Anecdotes from the history of modern computing

The book includes index

Preface.
Introduction.
1. The ENIAC Story.
2. The First British Stored-Program Computer.
3. The First American Commercial Computer.
4. The First Real-Time Computer—Whirlwind.
5. IBM's First Stored-Program Computer—IBM 701.
6. The First Mass Produced Computer—IBM 650.
7. Who Coined the Term Artificial Intelligence?.
8. The First Commercial High-level Programming Language.
9. Programs that Play Board Games.
10. Integrated Circuits.
11. IBM 1401 Data Processing System—Darling of Small Businesses.
12. Who Designed COBOL?.
13. The Story of Digital Equipment Corporation.
14. Atlas—A Pioneering British Computer.
15. CTSS—The First Time-sharing Operating System.
16. Who Invented Packet Switching?
17. The First Data Base Management System.
18. CDC 6600—Cray's First Supercomputer.
19. IBM System/360—Birth of a Computer Family.
20. Neural Networks.
21. BASIC and the Dartmouth Time-sharing System.
22. From ELIZA to Alexa—History of Human-Computer Conversation.
23. Electronic Payment Systems.
24. Expert Systems.
25. The Birth of Unix.
26. Project MAC—Towards a Computing Utility.
27. The First Packet-Switched Wide Area Network—ARPANET.
28. The ALOHAnet—The First Random-Access Wireless Network.
29. A Concise History of Robots.
30. System R—The First Relational Data Base Management System.
31. Who Invented Email?.
32. The First Commercial Microprocessor—Intel 4004.
33. History of Computer Games.
34. Xerox PARC and Alto Personal Computer.
35. CP/M and Gary Kildall.
36. Cryptography.
37. Computer Graphics—The Utah Teapot and Animated Hand.
38. The First Local Area Network.
39. Apple I and Apple II—Birth of the First Commercial Personal Computers.
40. Cray-1—A Computer Architecture Marvel.
41. The First Inter-Networking Project.
42. The First Reduced Instruction Set Computer.
43. Invention of the Global Positioning System.
44. Rise and Fall of Workstations.
45. The First Spreadsheet Program for Personal Computers.
46. Birth of the IBM Personal Computer.
47. Osborne 1—The First Portable Computer.
48. CSNET, Merit Network, and BITNET.
49. Minitel: The French Online Marketplace.
50. Caltech Cosmic Cube and Successors.
51. Evolution of Domain Name System.
52. Multimedia Digitisation and Compression.
53. Transputer-based Parallel Computers.
54. Cray–1's Successors.
55. Connection Machine—The First Massively Parallel Computer.
56. Free Open Source Software Movement.
57. ETA 10 Supercomputer—Genesis and Demise.
58. Internet Goes Public.
59. Beowulf Cluster—A Poor Man's Supercomputer.
60. World Wide Web is Born.
61. Search Engines.
62. History of Mobile Computers.
63. ASCI Red—The First Teraflop Supercomputer.
64. Who Invented Wi-Fi?.
65. Evolution of Graphics Processing Hardware.
66. IBM Blue Gene Series of Supercomputers—First to Breach 100 TeraFLOPS Speed.
67. The Facebook Story.
68. Cloud Computing Arrives.
69. IBM Roadrunner—The First Supercomputer to Breach the PetaFLOPS Barrier.
70. Raspberry Pi—The Story of a $35 Computer.
71. Cray HPE Frontier—The First Supercomputer to Breach the ExaFLOPS Barrier.
72. ChatGPT and AI Assistants.
Index.

This book recounts the history of modern computing as a sequence of seventy-two anecdotes, beginning with how engineers at the University of Pennsylvania built the modern stored program computer ENIAC in 1946 and ends with the story of the evolution of ChatGPT and Gemini, the generative large language model neural network released between 2022 and 2024 that give natural language answers to natural language questions, write essays, compose poems, and write computer programs. The anecdotes in this book are short. Each anecdote is between 1500 and 2500 words and recounts the story of an important invention in the evolution of modern computing and the people who innovated. There are seventy-two anecdotes in this book.