Chrono Atlas · History of Computing

Five rivers, forty-seven nodes: the history of computing as one long flowing timeline from 1830 to 2030.

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Five rivers, forty-seven nodes: the history of computing as one long flowing timeline from 1830 to 2030.

Build a flowing river atlas of computing history: five parallel rivers — theory, hardware, software, networks, and intelligence — run side by side from 1830 to 2030, carrying forty-seven floating nodes, among them Babbage's Analytical Engine, Ada's first program, Boolean algebra, the punched-card tabulator, the Turing machine, Shannon's switching circuits, the transistor, information theory, the Dartmouth workshop, the integrated circuit, Unix and C, the microprocessor, the World Wide Web, AlexNet, the Transformer, and agents. The rivers keep flowing on their own once the page loads. Opening any node along the way tells its anecdote: what it changed, which earlier thread it continues, and which later one it feeds into. The atlas supports a horizontal drift view and a vertical archive view, a full list of all forty-seven nodes, and a time scale for orientation, with play and pause at the bottom, all over a dark riverbed with golden-brown mist. Single-file static page.

People index page

Adds an index of people next to the two views, so a visitor can look up Babbage, Ada, or Shannon by name and jump to their nodes on the river.

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Build a flowing river atlas of computing history: five parallel rivers — theory, hardware, software, networks, and intelligence — run side by side from 1830 to 2030, carrying forty-seven floating nodes, among them Babbage's Analytical Engine, Ada's first program, Boolean algebra, the punched-card tabulator, the Turing machine, Shannon's switching circuits, the transistor, information theory, the Dartmouth workshop, the integrated circuit, Unix and C, the microprocessor, the World Wide Web, AlexNet, the Transformer, and agents. The rivers keep flowing on their own once the page loads. Opening any node along the way tells its anecdote: what it changed, which earlier thread it continues, and which later one it feeds into. The atlas supports a horizontal drift view and a vertical archive view, a full list of all forty-seven nodes, and a time scale for orientation, with play and pause at the bottom, all over a dark riverbed with golden-brown mist. Single-file static page.

Light riverbed theme

Regrounds the rivers on a light paper tone with dark-cyan mist instead of the dark riverbed, giving the whole timeline the feel of a rice-paper scroll.

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Build a flowing river atlas of computing history: five parallel rivers — theory, hardware, software, networks, and intelligence — run side by side from 1830 to 2030, carrying forty-seven floating nodes, among them Babbage's Analytical Engine, Ada's first program, Boolean algebra, the punched-card tabulator, the Turing machine, Shannon's switching circuits, the transistor, information theory, the Dartmouth workshop, the integrated circuit, Unix and C, the microprocessor, the World Wide Web, AlexNet, the Transformer, and agents. The rivers keep flowing on their own once the page loads. Opening any node along the way tells its anecdote: what it changed, which earlier thread it continues, and which later one it feeds into. The atlas supports a horizontal drift view and a vertical archive view, a full list of all forty-seven nodes, and a time scale for orientation, with play and pause at the bottom, all over a dark riverbed with golden-brown mist. Single-file static page.

Key turning-point flashes

Adds a flash marker when playback passes a key turning point, so during autoplay the moments that changed the course of the river announce themselves.

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Build a flowing river atlas of computing history: five parallel rivers — theory, hardware, software, networks, and intelligence — run side by side from 1830 to 2030, carrying forty-seven floating nodes, among them Babbage's Analytical Engine, Ada's first program, Boolean algebra, the punched-card tabulator, the Turing machine, Shannon's switching circuits, the transistor, information theory, the Dartmouth workshop, the integrated circuit, Unix and C, the microprocessor, the World Wide Web, AlexNet, the Transformer, and agents. The rivers keep flowing on their own once the page loads. Opening any node along the way tells its anecdote: what it changed, which earlier thread it continues, and which later one it feeds into. The atlas supports a horizontal drift view and a vertical archive view, a full list of all forty-seven nodes, and a time scale for orientation, with play and pause at the bottom, all over a dark riverbed with golden-brown mist. Single-file static page.