Research

It's very easy to lose perspective in the fast moving world of computers, so here's a timeline to help keep things in order.

The Beginning We tend to think of digital communication as a new idea but in 1844 a man called Samuel Morse sent a message 37 miles from Washington D.C. to Baltimore, using his new invention ‘The Telegraph’. This may seem a far cry from today's computer networks but the principals remain the same.

1973 On May 22, 1973, Bob Metcalfe at Xerox PARC documented the invention of Ethernet in a memo, which described communication across different "ethers" - including cable, telephone, and radio - building on the ALOHAnet protocol. Bob Metcalfe, David Boggs, and Tat Lam built the first Ethernet prototype at 2.94 Mbps.

Ruby, by definition, is a general purpose, dynamic and object oriented programming language. The syntax of Ruby is inspired from Perl. Ruby originally belongs to Japan as it was developed there in the mid 1990s and it was initially developed by Yukihiro Matsumoto. Similar to Perl, Ruby also supports various programming paradigms like object oriented paradigm, procedural paradigm, functional paradigm, reflective paradigm and imperative paradigm.

The Pioneer Spirit The ten years from 1950 saw the development of the first computer languages. From machine code to assembler was a natural step but to go beyond that took five years of work and the production of Fortran 1. At the close of the 50s the programming world had the trinity of Fortran, Cobol and Algol and the history of computing languages had completed its most critical phase.

In history, humans invented ingenious calculating machines. The first one is the Abacus. In 1600’s there are some mechanical calculators that was developed. These machines could perform addition and multiplication but they cannot perform subtraction.

Object-Oriented Programming is not a simple concept to grasp. Numerous OOP C++ books have been written about the subject. It implies many different software design techniques. In this article I briefly explain Object-Oriented programming in simple to understand terms.

This is a work in progress. It’s bogged down because I had a neat idea of the evolution of structure in programming methodologies, which probably bears little resemblance to the real history of programming.

Computer Languages History 1954-2003

To commemorate the 50th year of modern computing and the Computer Society, the timeline on the following pages traces the evolution of computing and computer technology.