The defining moments in computing and video game history — verified, dated, and sourced.
ENIAC is taught as the first electronic computer, but 1973's Honeywell v. Sperry Rand invalidated its patent — partly over a 1941 visit to Atanasoff.
Ray Tomlinson deserves credit for one specific breakthrough: networked email. Same-machine electronic mail existed years before he touched it.
The Apple I and II are often credited as the birth of personal computing. The Altair 8800 beat them to market by more than a year.
What the preserved 1947 Mark II logbook proves about its famous moth, what later retellings invented, and what Hopper actually achieved.
Find RFCs, decode status and obsoleted-by chains, read MUST/SHOULD normative language, and use the primary specs behind email and the web.
How the 1988 Morris Worm spread through Unix systems, disrupted the young internet, drove CERT's creation, and led to a landmark US computer-crime conviction.
How Napster's centralized index enabled peer-to-peer music sharing, triggered landmark litigation, and forced the recording industry toward digital distribution.
Google's September 1998 incorporation turned a Stanford search prototype into a company, but the algorithm, domain, and first funding came earlier.
What happened on November 2, 1988, how the Morris Worm propagated, why it overloaded hosts, and how the incident changed internet security coordination.
Why the US video game crash was a market and distribution failure—not one bad cartridge—and how Nintendo rebuilt retailer and consumer trust.