# History

{ Though history is usually written by the winners, this one was written by a loser who liked to sleep during school history lessons, so it's likely I put some bullshit here, send me correcting mails pls. ~drummyfish }

History is a partly scientific discipline that studies the past, in a strict sense concerned with the past of which written records exist (with times prior being called prehistory). This article will briefly recount both the history AND prehistory of technology and computers (and some other things). But first let us preface a few caveats, observations and lessons that history in general taught us so far:

- Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it, AKA lessons no. 1.
- History repeats itself, AKA lesson no. 2. Combined with the point above this would mean that most people don't know history. History repeating itself means that the patterns are always the same, even if with different actors, names and technology, but the superficial differences are enough to make retards not spot the repeating patterns, and so they will always continue to make the same mistakes over and over.
- History of human civilization can be viewed as a **series of disasters**, usually called "revolutions", by which humans invent more and more ways to become miserable. These include the Agricultural revolution, Industrial revolution, Information/Computer revolution etc.
- History will ALWAYS be a subjective, biased narrative. It cannot be otherwise because we attempt to record an infinitely complex and complicated state of spacetime with only a finite number of words in human language, we are inevitably forced to leave something out, to dedicate more paragraphs to one even than to another, and on top of that, try as we might, we are ourselves imperfect and biased humans with incomplete knowledge, making mistakes and errors, willingly or not. At the very least we are forced to focus on what of history is relevant to our "here and now" and leave out anything irrelevant, which is for example why we, the "westerners", know the history of Europe and America but not at all that of Asia, even if that is no less important.
- "A man cannot step into the same river twice", for it's never the same river. However you wish to repeat the past, you cannot repeat it exactly, you can never again make the Enlightenment age art or 90s video games because the Enlightenment age and 1990s are over. However, like LRS has shown in an earthshattering demonstration, you can culturally time travel back to times prior and then becomes possible to again create the same kind of art, example of which is Anarch, a 1990s video game made in late 2010s.
- History is written by the winners, i.e. the mainstream version of history is that made by whoever is currently in the rule, and this version is biased (in accordance with the above given point) towards the interest of the rulers, typically painting them as the good guys whose acts of violence were "justified" and "necessary" etc. There are no exceptions to this, although citizens of the ruling superpower always universally think that they are the exception.
- Very recent history is extremely blurry and obscured by propaganda. In general NOTHING in recent history should be taken as "proven", everything is uncertain and we must accept that we DO NOT KNOW. It's been said that a somewhat objective version of history shows only after about at least 50 years, but this may be even much longer if for example the same kind of dictatorship stays in the rule for much longer.
- On the other hand truth about very old history may be lost to us forever too, we must take into account things such as the recency bias and that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence -- it's too easy to think that since we haven't found evidence of advanced civilization older than X, there must have been none, but we must keep in mind that older evidence has a lower probability of being preserved, i.e. all we can claim is that after X there definitely was an advanced civilization, but before that we DON'T KNOW, we must remain agnostic and treat this time in respect to both unknown possibilities. Unfortunately great many people fall victim either to the atheist fallacy ("there is no God until proven otherwise") or theist fallacy ("there is God until proven otherwise"), the only truly rational view is always agnosticism.
- Even though history is a little lazily (and for propaganda reasons as well) painted as such, there are practically NEVER any historic firsts, as in "at this date this guy invented this" or "this is the day America was discovered". All change occurs as a gradual transition, any invention and discovery happens as a minuscule step taken after centuries of other tiny steps made by thousands of other men, and not rarely are inventions made independently by several people at once. There was never any first computer because what counts as a computer is especially sensitive to the details of our definition of such a device (Must it be digital? Fully digital? Electronic? Fully electronic? General purpose? Turing complete? etc.). We can artificially settle on a definition but there is no objective way to do so (and doing so is often politically motivated, e.g. by WHO we wish to be the inventor of the first computer); making any slight change to the definition will make our "first ever computer" jump across many centuries. All technology also takes time to come to the people and distant parts of the world. No one invented the light bulb or theory of relativity from the ground up, the contribution of that who is credited for the invention is probably less than 1% -- very often people credited for inventing something haven't even done ANYTHING at all besides bringing the invention to the market or making it popular. So even if our narrative of history mentions these "firsts", they must be seen only as highlights, a shift of focus.
- A curious pattern of history is that the "center of civilization" -- or maybe rather the dominating superpowers -- are moving towards the west, kind of like: middle East -> Greece -> Rome -> Holy Roman Empire -> England/France/Spain -> America. It could also be argued that the "civilization" has been spreading from the "Fertile Crescent origin" outwards and the edges are where the civilization is at its peak (possibly thanks to having access to new lands with unclaimed resources?), i.e. the furthest east (Japan) and also furthest south (Australia) etc. are also at the peak, but for some reason the western edge turned out to prevail in power.
- ...

## Summary of All History

The Universe began in singularity and started to exist with the Big Bang almost 14 billion years ago. It went through several epochs during which it underwent fantastic changes: first there was the epoch of rapid inflation, up to about 10^-32 seconds, during which it expanded extremely rapidly. After this the fundamental forces (strong, weak, electromagnetic and gravitational) started to become separate, the universe was cooling down. Then for a few eons nothing happen. After 200 million years, first stars started to form. After another 200 million years first galaxies started to form, including our own Milky Way galaxy. Our Earth formed some 4.5 billion years ago, along with the Moon (created by an impact of Earth with a large body called Theia). It seems life appeared about 3.8 billions years ago, it's held that most likely it somehow arose by pure chance from the primordial soup and the energy of the Sun, perhaps when a few molecules ended up in such an arrangement that they started to copy themselves (so called *replicators*, for example the DNA), whereupon the process of natural selection took over and led to the evolution of more and more sophisticated replicators that were now competing for the limited resources, culminating in single cell organisms replicating by division. About 600 million years ago multicellular life formed and soon there would be multitudes of species with different strategies to spread their genes (sexual reproduction, photosynthesis, predation, parasitism, collaboration, ...). 66 million years ago the very successful group of animals known as dinosaurs went extinct due to the devastating impact of the Chicxulub asteroid (probably more than 10 km in diameter), leaving an opportunity to mammals and eventually us, humans, to go on to conquer the planet thereafter.

Incredibly, a tree that lived 60 million years ago is still surviving to this day, or at least "in a sense" -- a small forest of Wollemi pines in Australia comes from an original single tree that keeps cloning itself since the time of dinosaurs, creating genetically identical trees over and over, and so we can still witness today "in a sense" the same tree that was around back then, just reincarnated countless times. A little later on, some 54 million years ago, a primitive species of gecko got trapped in an amber and got preserved in a near-perfect state until its discovery in 2005.

The earliest known appearance of technology related to humans may likely be the use of **stone tools** by hominids in Africa some two and a half million years ago (newest encyclopedia Britannica states even 3.3 million years ago) -- this is even before the appearance of modern humans, homo sapiens, who emerged roughly 600000 years ago. Around 40000 BC a branch of humans known as the Neanderthals went extinct, but before this happened it is known they interbred with our ancestors, we carry on some of their genes to this day (with the exception of black people who remained in Africa). We have also found art, such as small statuettes, of people from that time, but simple drawings estimated to be nearly doubly as old recently seem to have been discovered too. As humans spread and split, various human races emerged, for example the Europeans developed higher intelligence owing to the establishment of more complex social structures, white skin with less pigment thanks to less intense UV light and retained more body hair due to colder climate, whereas the original African race stayed black, less intelligent and without body hair. Specializations of each race followed from their environment: some adapted to higher altitudes (Sherpas), some took advantage of fertile soil and tame animals that could be domesticated to start agricultural life (notably Europeans) while others remained hunters gatherers (e.g. San people in south Africa). Australia seems to have been reached by people also shortly before 40000 BC from southeast Asia, which would however almost definitely require boats; America was the last continent settled (excluding Antarctica), between 20000 to 30000 years ago, most likely via the Bering land bridge. It's curiously suspicious that the extinction of large animals (such as the giant sloth) in both America and Australia coincides with the arrival of humans. Learning to start and control **fire** was another key invention of the earliest men; this probably happened hundreds of thousands to millions years ago, even before modern humans. Around 8000 BC the **Agricultural Revolution** happened: this was quite a disaster -- as humans domesticated animals and plants, they had to abandon the comfortable life of hunters and gatherers and started to suffer the life of a farmer, full of extremely hard work in the fields (this can be seen from their highly damaged bones). First farming settlements are known to have appeared in middle east, in an area of so called *Fertile Crescent* (roughly around today's Iraq), and these resulted in establishment of first cities that would later on become city states (as the name suggests -- something between a city and a state, i.e. highly independent cities with their own laws etc.). Some of the first such cities were Ur and Uruk in Mesopotamia, since around 5000 BC. Around 4000 BC sailing ships were already used on the Nile river. In 2832 BC a tree came to life that would survive until our current day -- its name is Methuselah and can be found in California. Primitive **writing** can be traced to about 7000 BC to China. **Wheel** was another crucial piece of technology humans invented, it is not known precisely when or where it appeared, but it might have been some time after 5000 BC -- in Ancient Egypt **The Great Pyramid** was built around 2570 BC still without the knowledge of wheel. Around 4000 BC **history starts with first written records**. Humans learned to smelt and use metals approximately 3300 BC (**Bronze Age**) and 1200 BC (**Iron Age**). **Abacus**, one of the simplest digital devices aiding with computation, was invented roughly around 2500 BC. However people used primitive computation helping tools, such as bone ribs, probably almost from the time they started trading. Babylonians in around 2000 BC were already able to solve some forms of **quadratic equations**.

In Greece many city states, such as Athens, Delphi and Sparta formed -- Ancient Greek culture would be seen as the golden age of civilization that would lay foundations to everything we now take for granted; Greeks to some extent advanced technology (e.g. architecture) but especially cultivated art, philosophy and politics -- Athens are credited for inventing democracy (though an "early" version, they still had slaves and many classes of citizens without voting power). In 8th century BC Homer created the epic poems Iliad and Odyssey. In 6th century BC Pythagoras describes the Pythagorean theorem. After 600 BC the Greek philosophy starts to develop which would lead to strengthening of rational, scientific thinking and advancement of logic and mathematics. Some of the most famous Greek philosophers were Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and Diogenes. Around 400 BC **camera obscura** was already described in a written text from China where **gears** also seem to have been invented soon after. Around 300 BC Euklid wrote his famous *Elements*, a mathematical work that proves theorems from basic axioms. Ancient Greeks could communicate over great distances using **Phryctoria**, chains of fire towers placed on mountains that forwarded messages to one another using light. 234 BC Archimedes described the famous Archimedes screw and created an **algorithm for computing the number pi**. In 2nd century BC the **Antikythera mechanism, the first known analog computer** is made to predict movement of heavenly bodies. It is also at this time that the very significant Asian trading network known as the Silk Road started to form. Meanwhile the Romans, known to have been excellent builders, were creating many roads and structures such as the Pantheon (126 AD) and aqueducts with the use of their own type of **concrete** and advanced understanding of physics.

44 BC Julius Caesar, the most famous leader of Ancient Rome, is killed. Rome must be mentioned because at its time it was the biggest world superpower -- though it was an especially corrupted, warmongering empire standing on work of countless slaves, Rome advanced technology in many ways, e.g. by inventing concrete, building quality roads and very long lasting aqueducts. They knew how to heat houses and created monumental cities with luxurious baths, big ports, colossal statues and so on. They built monuments that would last for thousands of years, for instance the famous Colosseum.

Around 50 AD Heron of Alexandria, an Egyptian mathematician, created a number of highly sophisticated inventions such as a **vending machine** that accepted coins and gave out holy water, and a cart that could be "programmed" with strings to drive on its own.

In the 3rd century Chinese mathematician Liu Hui describes operations with **negative numbers**, even though negative numbers have already appeared before. In 600s AD an Indian astronomer Brahmagupta first used the number **zero** in a systematic way, even though hints on the number zero without deeper understanding of it appeared much earlier. In 9th century the Mayan empire is collapsing, though it would somewhat recover and reshape.

Year 476 is set to mark the fall of Roman empire (last roman emperor deposed) and by this the end of Antiquity and **start of Middle Ages**. Rome had been collapsing slowly but in its downfall it greatly resembled our current western society, it became split, people got spoiled, lost sense of morality, women started to demand more power and so on -- Roman empire was basically like the ancient times US (with a similar relationship to Greece as US has to the older, wiser Europe) with highly capitalist practices (free trade, ads, banks, insurance, even industries that achieved quite high mass production, ...), imperialism, military obsession, fascism, constant political fights, pragmatic thinking (e.g. rhetoric, the art of manipulation, was greatly preferred over excellence in art), mass entertainment and huge competitiveness -- this all led to its demise.

In 800 a Frankish king Charlemagne was crowned "Roman emperor" by the pope and this would be the beginning of so called *Holy Roman Empire*, a sort of group of united countries that dominated central Europe during middle ages. Around the year 850 the Chinese discovered **gunpowder** (hence all the obsession with fireworks and shit).

In 1429 Persian mathematician al-Kashi computed pi to about 14 digit accuracy which was a great leap in this discipline.

Around the year of our Lord 1450 a major technological leap known as the **Printing Revolution** occurred. Johannes Gutenberg, a German goldsmith, perfected the process of producing books in large quantities with the movable type press. This made books cheap to publish and buy and contributed to fast spread of information and better education. Around this time the **Great Wall of China** is being built.

The year 1492 marks the **discovery of America** by Christopher Columbus who sailed over the Atlantic Ocean, though he probably wasn't the first in history to do so, and it wasn't realized he sailed to America until after he died (he thought he sailed to India). This is sometimes taken to mark the **end of Middle Ages** and transition to **Renaissance**. This was a time of increased interest in rationality, science and art; Renaissance saw man as a potent creation of God, who is capable of creating on his own rather than being mere blind, obedient servant of God. Great many polymath lived at this time, most notably **Leonardo da Vinci** (probably gay) who was an excellent painter, explored human anatomy and even subjects such as astronomy and engineering. On one hand Renaissance brought beautiful art and new technology, on the other hand it further shifted society toward capitalism and selfish thinking, human became more self centered, egoistic and art became even more a matter of business -- for example the great painters infamously hired lesser artists to make copies of their paintings which were then sold almost like consumer products.

In the year 1543 Nicolas Copernicus published his book *De revolutionibus orbium coelestium* that challenged the contemporary model of geocentric Universe in favor of Heliocentric one, i.e. he proposed that the Earth revolves around the Sun rather than the other way around. It was banned on the grounds of being "pseudoscientific".

In 1642 Blaise Pascal, a french mathematician/inventor/philosopher, invented *Pascaline*, a simple mechanical calculator (however building on ideas dating back to antiquity), laying some very early foundations for automatic computation. (The Pascal programming language is named after him.) Shortly after Pascal another genius, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, further developed some basic theory (related e.g. to binary system and algorithms) that would much later on evolve into computer science. During this century allegedly the first microscope and telescope appeared.

During 1700s a major shift in civilization occurred to designate our further direction, called the **Industrial Revolution** -- this was another disaster that would lead to the transformation of common people to factory slaves and loss of their self sufficiency. The revolution spanned roughly from 1750 to 1850. It was a process of rapid change in the whole society due to new technological inventions that also led to big changes in how a man lived his daily life. It commenced in Great Britain but quickly spread over the whole world. One of the main changes was the **transition from manual manufacturing to factory manufacturing** using machines and sources of energy such as coal. **Steam engine played a key role**. Work became a form of a highly organized slavery system, society became industrionalized. This revolution became highly criticized as it unfortunately opened the door for capitalism, made people dependent on the system as everyone had to become a specialized cog in the society machine, at this time people started to measure time in minutes and lead very planned lives with less joy. But there was no way back.

In 1712 Thomas Newcomen invented the first widely used **steam engine** used mostly for pumping water, even though steam powered machines have already been invented long time ago. The engine was significantly improved by James Watt in 1776. Around 1770 Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot created a first somewhat working **steam-powered car**. In 1784 William Murdoch built a small prototype of a **steam locomotive** which would be perfected over the following decades, leading to a transportation revolution; people would be able to travel far away for work, the world would become smaller which would be the start of **globalization**. The railway system would make common people measure time with minute precision.

The date of 5 May 1789 marks the beginning of the **French Revolution**, a huge ass bloody uprising against the Monarchy and nobility that would end up in turning France into a republic. The revolution saw the invention of **guillotine**, an extremely efficient and reliable beheading machine (which in good society could easily be used for example for euthanasia and assisted suicide), but mainly brought about very "modern" political ideas such as the concept of left and right, "enlightenment", declaration of "human rights", various democratic and liberal concepts and so on.

In 1792 Clause Chappe invented **optical telegraph**, also called *semaphore*. The system consisted of towers spaced up to by 32 km which forwarded textual messages by arranging big arms on top of the towers to signal specific letters. With this messages between Paris and Strasbourg, i.e. almost 500 km, could be transferred in under half an hour. The system was reserved for the government, however in 1834 it was **hacked** by two bankers who bribed the tower operators to transmit information about stock market along with the main message (by setting specific positions of arms that otherwise didn't carry any meaning), so that they could get an advantage on the market.

By 1800 Alessandro Volta invented an **electric battery**. 1816 is known as **The Year Without Summer** for an unusual, catastrophic event -- now theorized to have been a giant volcanic eruption -- that for many months made the Sun get obscured and decreased temperatures, resulting in large famines. In 1827 André-Marie Ampère publishes a further work shedding light on electromagnetism. After this **electric telegraph** would be worked on and improved by several people and eventually made to work in practice. In 1821 Michael Faraday invented the **electromotor**. Georg Ohm and especially James Maxwell would subsequently push the knowledge of electricity even further.

Between 1803 and 1815 Europe suffered the Napoleonic Wars in which the French fascist dictator Napoleon Bonaparte (later a role model for Adolf Hitler) attacked everyone left and right and did some crazy shit. At the time this was kind of like the prequel to a World War. Napoleon died in 1821 on some shithole island. The Holy Roman Empire dissolved in 1806 as one of the results of the wars.

In 1822 Charles Babbage, a fantastic English mathematician, completed the first version of a manually powered **digital mechanical computer** called the Difference Engine whose purpose was to help with the computation of polynomial derivatives to subsequently create mathematical tables used e.g. in navigation. It was met with success and further development became funded by the government, however difficulties of the construction led to never finishing the whole project. In 1837 Babbage proceeded to designing a new machine, this time a **Turing complete general purpose computer**, i.e. allowing for programming with branches and loops, a true marvel of technology. It also ended up not being built completely, but it showed a lot about what computers would be, e.g. it had an assembly-like programming language, memory etc. For this computer Ada Lovelace would famously write the Bernoulli number algorithm.

In 1826 or 1827 French inventor Nicéphore Niépce captured **first photography** that survived until today -- a view from his estate named Le Gras. About an 8 hour exposure was used (some say it may have taken several days). He used a camera obscura and asphalt plate that hardened where the light was shining. Earlier cases of photography existed maybe as early as 1717, but they were only short lived. In 1856 Jean Le Bris performed the **first powered flight** in a glider towed by horses, covering a distance of 200 meters.

Between 1861 and 1865 there was the American Civil War, one between the North (AKA the Union) and South (AKA the Confederacy), mainly over the legality of slavery. The confederacy won and slavery was officially abolished (but under capitalism everyone would become a slave anyway so it didn't matter).

**Sound recording** with phonatograph was invented in 1857 in Paris, however it could not be played back at the time -- the first record of human voice made with this technology can nowadays be reconstructed and played back. It wouldn't be until 1878 when people could both record and play back sounds with  Edison's improvement of phonatograph. A year later, in 1879, Edison also patented the **light bulb**, even though he didn't invent it -- there were at least 20 people who created a light bulb before him. Pi at this time is evaluated to roughly 500 digit accuracy (using Machin's formula). In 1867 Austria-Hungary forms to become a great European empire.

Around 1888 so called **war of the currents** was taking place; it was a heated battle between companies and inventors for whether the alternating or direct current would become the standard for distribution of electric energy. The main actors were Thomas Edison, a famous inventor and a huge capitalist dick rooting for DC, and George Westinghouse, the promoter of AC. Edison and his friends used false claims and even killing of animals to show that AC was wrong and dangerous, however AC was objectively better, e.g. by its efficiency thanks to using high voltage, and so it ended up winning the war. AC was also supported by the famous genius inventor Nikola Tesla who during these times contributed hugely to electric engineering, he e.g. invented an AC motor and Tesla coil and created a system for wireless transmission of electric power.

Also in 1888 probably the **first video** that survived until today was recorded by Lou Le Prince in Northern England, with a single lens camera. It is a nearly 2 second silent black and white shot of people walking in a garden.

1895 can roughly be seen as the year of **invention of radio**, specifically wireless telegraph, by Italian engineer and inventor Guglielmo Marconi. He built on top of work of others such as Hertz and Tesla and created a device with which he was able to wirelessly ring a bell at a distance over 2 km.

On December 17 1903 the Wright brothers famously performed the **first controlled flight of a motor airplane** which they built, in North Carolina. In repeated attempts they flew as far as 61 meters over just a few seconds.

In 1907 Lee De Forest invented a practically usable **vacuum tube**, an extremely important part usable in electric devices for example as an amplifier or a switch -- this would enable construction of radios, telephones and later even primitive computers. The invention would lead to the electronic revolution. Also in 1907 Belinographe was invented, allowing transmission of photographs over telephone lines. In the region of Tunguska in Russia a remarkable event occurred in 1908 -- a meteor (about 55 meters in size) exploded above ground, resulting in gigantic explosion, the largest in recent history.

From 1914 to 1918 there was **World War I**. As its consequence Austria-Hungary was destroyed and broken into small shitholes such as Czechoslovakia.

Meanwhile (around 1915) Albert Einstein, a German physicist, completed his **General Theory of Relativity**, a groundbreaking physics theory that describes the fundamental nature of space and time and gives so far the best description of the Universe since Newton. This would shake the world of science as well as popular culture and would enable advanced technology including nuclear energy, nuclear weapons, space satellites, high speed computers and many others.

7 November 1917 was the date of so called October Revolution ("October" because of different dating back then) that was part of the  **Russian Revolution** led by Vladimir Lenin and his Marxist Bolshevik party. This got rid of the Russian Empire and would eventually establish the **Soviet Union** in 1922.

In 1923 the research of mainly Edwin Hubble leads to the conclusion that there exist other galaxies in the Universe besides our Milky Way, vastly expanding the size of known Universe.

In 1924 about 50% of US households own a car.

October 22 1925 witnessed the invention of **transistor** by Julius Lilienfeld (Austria-Hungary), a component that would replace vacuum tubes thanks to its better properties, and which would become probably the most essential part of computers. At the time the invention didn't see much attention, it would only become relevant decades later.

In 1931 Kurt Gödel, a genius mathematician and logician from Austria-Hunagry (nowadays Czech Republic), published revolutionary papers on his incompleteness theorems which proved that, simply put, mathematics has fundamental limits and "can't prove everything". This led to **Alan Turing**'s publications in 1936 that nowadays stand as the **foundations of computer science** -- he introduced a theoretical computer called the **Turing machine** and with it he proceeded to prove that computers, no matter how powerful, will never be able to "compute everything". Turing also predicted the importance of computers in the future and has created several algorithms for future computers (such as a chess playing program).

In 1938 Konrad Zuse, a German engineer, constructed **Z1, the first working electric mechanical digital partially programmable computer** in his parents' house. It weighted about a ton and wasn't very reliable, but brought huge innovation nevertheless. It was programmed with punched film tapes, however programming was limited, it was NOT Turing complete and there were only 8 instructions. Z1 ran on a frequency of 1 to 4 Hz and most operations took several clock cycles. It had a 16 word memory and worked with floating point numbers. The original computer was destroyed during the war but it was rebuilt and nowadays can be seen in a Berlin museum. Zuse also soon created what's regarded as the **first programming language**, Plankalkul.

From 1939 to 1945 there was **World War II**.

In hacker culture the period between 1943 (start of building of the ENIAC computer) to about 1955-1960 is known as the **Stone Age of computers** -- as the Jargon File puts it, the age when electromechanical dinosaurs ruled the Earth.

In 1945 the construction of **the first electronic digital fully programmable computer** was completed at University of Pennsylvania as the US Army project. It was named **ENIAC** (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer). It used 18000 vacuum tubes and 15000 relays, weighted 27 tons and ran on the frequency of 5 KHz. Punch cards were used to program the computer in its machine language; it was Turing complete, i.e. allowed using branches and loops. ENIAC worked with signed ten digit decimal numbers. Also in 1945 on July 16 Americans detonated the first nuclear bomb in history as a test, later on that year **USA used two nuclear bombs to murder hundreds of thousands of civilians** in Japanese cities Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with American president laughing from afar. Around this time John von Neumann, a great genius with wide areas of interest, is also making great contributions to computer science, famously e.g. proposing the von Neumann computer architecture in which the program and data are stored in the same memory -- a concept that would be highly utilized in the future.

On March 16 1953 Richard Stallman, the future father of free software and the immensely important GNU project, is born. Two years later Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, two biggest retards of the 20th century (yes, counting Hitler too), are unfortunately born.

Among hackers the period between 1961 to 1971 is known as the **Iron Age of computers**. The period spans time since the first minicomputer (PDP1) to the first microprocessor (Intel 4004). This would be followed by so called *elder days*.

On July 20 1969 **first men landed on the Moon** (Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin) during the USA Apollo 11 mission (see also moonhoax). This remarkable achievement is now attributed to the pressure of cold war in which USA and Soviet Union competed in space exploration, racing to be the first in historical achievements and developing more advanced technology for potential military use. The landing was achieved with the help of a relatively simple on-board computer: Apollo Guidance Computer clocked at 2 MHz, had 4 KiB of RAM and about 70 KB ROM. The assembly source code of its software is nowadays available online.

Shortly after, on 29 October 1969, another historical event would take place that could be seen as the beginning of perhaps the greatest technological revolution yet, the **start of the Internet**. The first letter, "L", was sent over a long distance via **ARPANET**, a new experimental computer packet switching network without a central node developed by US defense department (they intended to send "LOGIN" but the system crashed). The network would start to grow and gain new nodes, at first mostly universities. The network would become the Internet. Near the end of this year a little Terry Davis is born!

1st January 1970 is nowadays set as the start of the **Unix epoch**. It is the date from which Unix time is counted. During this time the **Unix operating system, one of the most influential operating systems** was being developed at Bell Labs, mainly by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie. Along the way they developed the famous Unix philosophy as well as the **C programming language**, perhaps the most influential programming language in history. Unix and C would shape the technology far into the future, a whole family of operating systems called Unix-like would be developed and regarded as the best operating systems thanks to their minimalist design.

By 1977 ARPANET had about 60 nodes. In March of 1978 the first version of **BSD**, Berkeley software distribution, was released as a set of software and addons for the proprietary operating system Unix -- this software would later on evolve into a wholly free as in freedom operating system.

August 12 1981 would see the released of **IBM PC**, a personal computer based on open, modular architecture that would immediately be very successful and would become the de-facto standard of personal computers. IBM PC was the first of the kind of desktop computers we have today. It had 4.77 MHz Intel 8088 CPU, 16 kB of RAM and used 5.25" floppy disks.

In 1983 **Richard Stallman announced his GNU project and invented free (as in freedom) software**, a kind of software that is freely shared and developed by the people so as to respect the users' freedom. This kind of ethical software stands opposed to the proprietary corporate software, it would lead to creation of some of the most important software and to a whole revolution in software development and its licensing, it would spark the creation of other movements striving for keeping ethics in the information age.

1985: on November 20 the first version of the **Windows "operating system"** was sadly released by Micro$oft. This malware would become the mainstream desktop operating system despite its obnoxious design and would sadly forever stain computer technology with so called Windows philosophy, irreversibly corrupting other mainstream technology as well. Also in 1985 one of the deadliest software bugs appeared: that in Therac-25, a medical radiotherapy device which fatally overdosed several patients with radiation.

On April 26 1986 the **Chernobyl nuclear disaster** happened (the worst power plant accident in history) -- in north Ukraine (at the time under USSR) a nuclear power plant exploded, contaminated a huge area with radioactivity and released a toxic radioactive cloud that would spread over Europe -- many would die either directly or indirectly (many years later due to radioactivity poisoning, estimated at many thousands). The Chernobyl area would be sealed in the 30 km radius. It is estimated the area won't be habitable again for several thousands of years.

Around this time Internet is not yet mainstream but it is, along with similar local networks, working and has active communities -- there is no world wide web yet but people are using Usenet and BBSes for "online" discussions with complete strangers and developing early "online cultures". In the year 1990 [drummyfish](drummyfish), the author of this article, is born :-)

At the beginning of 1991 Tim Berners-Lee created the **World Wide Web**, a network of interlinked pages on the Internet. This marks another huge step in the Internet revolution, the Web would become the primary Internet service and the greatest software platform for publishing any kind of information faster and cheaper than ever before. It is what would popularize the Internet and bring it to the masses. It is also in this year that the BSD system frees itself from the proprietary Unix system thanks to all the components being rewritten under free BSD licenses. This would soon thereafter result in spawn of the three major BSD forks: NetBSD, FreeBSD and OpenBSD.

Shortly after the **Soviet Union dissolved** and on 25 August 1991 **Linus Torvalds announced Linux**, his project for a completely free as in freedom Unix-like operating system kernel. Linux would become part of GNU and later one of the biggest and most successful software projects in history. It would end up powering Internet servers and supercomputers as well as desktop computers of a great number of users. Linux finally proved beyond any doubt that free software works and surpasses proprietary systems.

After this very recent history follows, it's hard to predict which recent events will be of historical importance to the future and thus worth recording here. 1990s have seen a colossal growth of computing power, video games such as Doom led to development of GPUs and high quality computer graphics along with a wide adoption of computers by common people, which in turn helped the further growth (and eventual downfall) of the Internet. In around mid 90s the web overtook gopher in popularity and started to become the forefront of the Internet. In 1995 Theo de Raadt started the OpenBSD project after disagreements about NetBSD development. Late 90s saw the rise of the "open source" movement (OSI was established in 1998). Worthy of mention is also the first animal cloned from an adult cell, a sheep named Dolly, in 1996. Duke Nukem was released also in this year. In 1997 the first computer achieved victory over human world chess champion in the famous Kasparov vs Deep Blue match. February 15 1999 was the Windows refund day on which GNU/Linux users tried, in accord with Windows EULA, to refund Windows shipped with laptops they bought, and were given a middle finger by Micro$oft. The year 2000 was infamously preceded by the Y2K hysteria, the fear and anticipation of technological collapse that was to be caused by computers flipping from the year 99 to 00 -- this of course didn't happen, but it's probably also thanks to the precautions taken. With the year 2000 21st century starts. Shortly after 2000 Lawrence Lessig founded Creative Commons, an organization that came hand in hand with the free culture movement inspired by the free software movement. At this point over 50% of US households had a computer. **September 11 2001** now marks one of the most notable events in recent history: the terrorist attacks on the New York Twin Towers with hijacked planes. The year 2001 additionally saw the release of the iconic Windows XP and establishment of Wikipedia, a free-licensed collaborative online encyclopedia which would soon by volume overpass any other encyclopedia written to date. In 2003 the whole human DNA was sequenced after 13 years of international collaborative effort. From 2005 we've seen a boom of social networks like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube and also skyrocketing popularity of online and massively online games, owing a lot to the gigantic success of World of Warcraft; all of these contributed to making Internet and computers one of the most mainstream and lucrative things, ruining everything. Cell phones became a commonly owned device and after about 2005 so called "smart phones" and other "smart" toys replaced them as a universal communication device capable of connecting to the Internet. The year 2010 seems to be the turning point beyond which societal decline accelerated and became uncontrollable; 1990s seem to have been the peak of society, after the year 2000 a slow decline started but by inertia things were still relatively good for about another decade. In 2011 Minecraft was released. After this we've seen the rise of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. In 2018 Terry Davis died. The global COVID pandemic starting at the end of the year 2019 is probably the most important highlight of the decade. Before 2020 we've also seen a brief spike in popularity of VR (that would diminish again) and a huge advancement in neural network Artificial Intelligence which will likely be the topic of the near future. 2022 saw the release of ChatGPT, the AI chatbot that started a worldwide sensation by its unprecedented, nearly human-like intelligence and ability to understand human language -- the event will likely be marked as the moment when we have truly succeeded at creating a human-like AI. Quantum computers are being highly researched with already existing primitive prototypes; this will also likely be very important in the following years. Besides AI there were also drones, electromobiles, robotic Mars exploration and other things. However the society and technology have been in decadence for some time now, capitalism has pushed technology to become hostile and highly abusive to users, extreme bloat of technology causes highly inefficient, immensely expensive and unreliable consumerist technology. In addition society is dealing with a lot of serious issues such as the global warming, pollution, mass extinction of organisms, skyrocketing economic inequality, overpopulation, genetic and cultural degeneration, scientific and artistic stagnation, mental health decline and numerous other catastrophes so that many are already predicting a collapse of society. The latest trend as of writing this is probably the boom of "AI" tools currently destroying the (mainstream) Internet with garbage of unprecedented proportions, something that came to be named "AI slop".

## Recent History Of Technology

TODO: more detailed history since the start of Unix time

## See Also

- future