Computer science
It started with Babbage's computation engine, which was all theory. Ada Lovelace figured out that programming could have wide applications. But it really started with the creation of the transistor at Bell Labs, for miniaturizing hearing aids, which happened to make computers practical to build. Come World War II, the first computer was built, named the ENIAC, funded because the army wanted calculate artillery firing tables.
At the same time, the Manhattan Project (for developing the atomic bomb) had many geniuses working at Los Alamos, who became so interested in the ENIAC that their stories intertwine. The first program it ran was to check the feasibility of H-bombs. Von Neumann and Stanislaw Ulam programmed it to do Monte Carlo calculations at some point.
But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Alan Turing, John von Neumann and some others were huge figures in determining how to build a computer. Conceiving of pseudorandom number generators and all the other things you need.
Most programmers of early computers were women – and when the world realized that programming was where the important and cool things happened, men moved into the field and it started being a "man's job", something that women supposedly couldn't do.
After WWII, much research was done at Bell Labs and Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center), now legendary because for some decades, physicists got lots and lots of funding at places like them to research whatever they liked (the atomic age made physicists sexy). Computers were these huge machines costing millions, and mainly a research curiosity, hard to justify economically except that the physicists were asking for them. The UNIX operating system was thus partly 'by academics for academics', partly commercial. Bright people like Dennis Ritchie set down fundamental rules for OS development that make it less bug-ridden, what we call the UNIX philosophy.
The US DoD conceived of Arpanet and gave two guys a year to figure out how to make it maximally decentralized. Add Tim Berners-Lee's WWW invention and poof, internet.
Dijkstra, Knuth (TeX and so many things), Steele (Lisp machines), Stallman (GPL), …
Major locations
- Los Alamos, during the Manhattan Project
- Bell Labs
- Xerox PARC
See old movie, Pirates of Silicon Valley.
- Antikythera Mechanism
- Babbage
- 1816-1852 Ada Lovelace
- 1903-1957 John von Neumann
- 1906-1992 Grace Hopper
- 1912-1954 Alan Turing
- 1938- Donald Knuth
- 1955- Tim Berners-Lee
- kahle
- ritchie
- djb
- rms
- Alexander Bell
- Claude Shannon
- Edsger Dijkstra