Periods
Eight periods that structure the history of modern technology, from early mechanical machines to contemporary AI architectures.
Mrjohncummings (Science Museum, London) — CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
1800–1940
Mechanical Origins
The mechanical origins of computing are rooted in the long European tradition of calculating instruments, from Blaise Pascal's pascaline in 1642 and Leibniz's m…
Windell Oskay — CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
1940–1970
Electronic Era
The electronic era opens around the Second World War, when the demands of cryptanalysis, ballistics and atomic computation require speeds unreachable by mechani…
Hellis (it.wikipedia) — CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
1970–1990
Personal Computing
Personal computing was born of the encounter between the microprocessor and a Californian counter-cultural ethos committed to decentralising computing power. In…
ARPA — Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
1969–1995
Birth of the Internet
The birth of the Internet resulted from a research effort funded by the American ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency), in a Cold War context where the resil…
Coolcaesar — CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
1991–2004
Web Era
The Web era opens with the proposal drafted in March 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN, "Information Management: A Proposal", and culminates in the publication of…
Wikimedia Foundation — CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
2004–2012
Web 2.0 & Social Media
The term "Web 2.0", popularised by Tim O'Reilly at the first Web 2.0 Conference held in San Francisco in October 2004, denotes a shift of the Web toward user-ge…
Victor Grigas — CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
2007–2020
Mobile & Cloud
The Mobile & Cloud period opens on 9 January 2007, when Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone at Macworld in San Francisco, then released it commercially on 29 June th…
OpenAI — Public domain (logo, simple shapes/text), via Wikimedia Commons
2017–
Generative AI
The generative AI era is rooted in the publication, by eight researchers from Google Brain and the University of Toronto in June 2017, of the paper "Attention I…