Computing Atlas
Claims this atlas currently marks as unsettled or as tested and found false. A debated fact is one scholars hold competing positions on; a debunked one has been checked against the record and found not to hold. Both are kept in view rather than quietly smoothed over, with the reasoning that put each one where it stands.
59 statements marked Debated.
ENIAC, SignificanceWidely called the first general purpose electronic digital computer, though the claim is contested given Colossus's earlier, classified electronic use and a 1973 US court ruling crediting the underlying concept to John Atanasoff.
ENIAC, Systems
Standing
Concerns Significance
Currently States Widely called the first general purpose electronic digital computer, though the claim is contested given Colossus's earlier, classified electronic use and a 1973 US court ruling crediting the underlying concept to John Atanasoff.
The court finding is a matter of public record (Honeywell v Sperry Rand, 1973); which machine deserves the title first general purpose electronic digital computer remains a live historical dispute rather than a settled fact.
Evolutionary Computation, Origin Year1991
Evolutionary Computation, Fields
Standing
Concerns Origin Year
Currently States 1991
The field's four branches (evolution strategies, evolutionary programming, genetic algorithms from the 1950s-60s; genetic programming from the early 1990s) developed independently; the unifying term evolutionary computing was coined only in 1991.
Source Evolutionary Computation (Wikipedia)
Finite State Machine, Origin Year1943
Finite State Machine, Concepts
Standing
Concerns Origin Year
Currently States 1943
McCulloch and Pitts's 1943 neural-network paper is the formalism's traced ancestor, but the finite-state-machine article itself carries no dedicated history section fixing a single founding year for the model as later formalized in automata theory.
Source Wikipedia: Finite-state machine
Functional Programming, Origin Year1977
Functional Programming, Concepts
Standing
Concerns Origin Year
Currently States 1977
The lambda calculus (1930s) and Lisp (1958) supplied functional programming's mathematical and practical roots, but the paradigm was named and argued for as a discipline in John Backus's 1977 Turing Award lecture, so scholars date the named paradigm differently from its technical origins.
Source Wikipedia: Functional programming
Garbage Collection, Origin Year1959
Garbage Collection, Concepts
Standing
Concerns Origin Year
Currently States 1959
The technique is dated to around 1959, but its own seminal description did not appear in print until McCarthy's 1960 Communications of the ACM paper; the invention year and the publication year are two different dates, both recorded rather than collapsed into one.
Source Wikipedia: Garbage collection (computer science)
GPU Computing, Origin Year2003
GPU Computing, Fields
Standing
Concerns Origin Year
Currently States 2003
Marks a widely cited milestone; GPUs were used informally for general computation before this.
Source GPU Computing (Wikipedia)
Graydon Hoare, NationalityCanadian
Graydon Hoare, Pioneers
Standing
Concerns Nationality
Currently States Canadian
Source Wikipedia: Graydon Hoare
Grid Computing, Origin Year1999
Grid Computing, Fields
Standing
Concerns Origin Year
Currently States 1999
Marks the book that made the power-grid metaphor canonical; the underlying utility-computing metaphor is dated in the same source to 1961.
Source Grid Computing (Wikipedia)
Harvard Mark I, SignificanceCredited to Aiken alone in his own contemporary publicity, though IBM engineers did much of the detailed design and construction; a documented dispute over invention credit rather than a settled attribution.
Harvard Mark I, Systems
Standing
Concerns Significance
Currently States Credited to Aiken alone in his own contemporary publicity, though IBM engineers did much of the detailed design and construction; a documented dispute over invention credit rather than a settled attribution.
Aiken issued a press release naming himself sole inventor and crediting only IBM engineer James Bryce; IBM chairman Thomas Watson's anger at the omission of the rest of IBM's engineering team is separately documented.
Source Wikipedia: Harvard Mark I
Human-Robot Interaction, Origin Year1941
Human-Robot Interaction, Fields
Standing
Concerns Origin Year
Currently States 1941
Marks Asimov's 1941 fictional articulation of the human-safety problem (the Three Laws of Robotics); this predates HRI as an academic discipline.
Source Human-Robot Interaction (Wikipedia)
IAS Machine, SignificanceEstablished what is now called the von Neumann architecture, a general organization the article's own lead states was both conceived and implemented by others, even though the machine is popularly named for von Neumann because he edited the paper describing the design.
IAS Machine, Systems
Standing
Concerns Significance
Currently States Established what is now called the von Neumann architecture, a general organization the article's own lead states was both conceived and implemented by others, even though the machine is popularly named for von Neumann because he edited the paper describing the design.
A naming-versus-credit distinction the article states directly: the design is popularly attributed to von Neumann's name, but the lead itself says the architecture was conceived and implemented by others.
Source Wikipedia: IAS machine
Information Security, Origin Year1972
Information Security, Fields
Standing
Concerns Origin Year
Currently States 1972
The need for computer security appeared during the Second World War, but the field's founding statement of principles is usually dated to the 1972 Anderson Report, so the origin year depends on whether the wartime need or the formal discipline is being dated.
Source Wikipedia: Information Security
Linked List, Origin Year1955
Linked List, Concepts
Standing
Concerns Origin Year
Currently States 1955
No single agreed inventor or date exists. The Information Processing Language, built by Allen Newell, Cliff Shaw and Herbert Simon around 1955 and 1956, is commonly cited among the earliest systems to use linked list style structures, and John McCarthy's Lisp, released in 1958, popularized the idea widely through its list cells; historians do not treat either as a clean single point of origin.
MESM, SignificanceSometimes described as the first universally programmable electronic computer in continental Europe, a claim this atlas records as contested rather than settled: the electromechanical Zuse Z4 and the Swedish BARK both preceded it, though neither used MESM's electronic design.
MESM, Systems
Standing
Concerns Significance
Currently States Sometimes described as the first universally programmable electronic computer in continental Europe, a claim this atlas records as contested rather than settled: the electromechanical Zuse Z4 and the Swedish BARK both preceded it, though neither used MESM's electronic design.
The article's own by some authors framing marks the continental-Europe priority claim as contested, not settled.
Source Wikipedia: MESM
NP-Completeness, Core PrincipleIf any single NP-complete problem could be solved in polynomial time, every problem in NP could be, which is the substance of the unresolved P versus NP question.
NP-Completeness, Concepts
Standing
Concerns Core Principle
Currently States If any single NP-complete problem could be solved in polynomial time, every problem in NP could be, which is the substance of the unresolved P versus NP question.
Whether P equals NP is one of the seven Millennium Prize Problems and remains unresolved; no known polynomial-time algorithm exists for any NP-complete problem, but this has not been proven impossible.
Source Wikipedia: NP-completeness
Object Oriented Programming, Origin Year1967
Object Oriented Programming, Concepts
Standing
Concerns Origin Year
Currently States 1967
Simula, released in 1967, is generally credited with the first classes, inheritance and dynamic binding of an object-oriented language, and Alan Kay was already using the term object-oriented programming in conversation the same year while developing Smalltalk, so the paradigm's origin year depends on whether the mechanism or the name is being dated.
Source Wikipedia: Object-oriented programming
Operating Systems, Origin Year1956
Operating Systems, Fields
Standing
Concerns Origin Year
Currently States 1956
Historians differ on which early batch monitor counts as the first operating system; the GM NAA I O system built for General Motors and North American Aviation in 1956 is commonly cited as an early example, but simpler loader and monitor programs existed before it and the field has no single agreed starting point.
Packet Switching, Origin Year1965
Packet Switching, Concepts
Standing
Concerns Origin Year
Currently States 1965
Invented independently twice: Paul Baran at RAND in the early 1960s and Donald Davies at the NPL in 1965. 1965 is Davies's date, and the term is his coinage; which invention counts as the origin is genuinely split between the two.
Source Wikipedia: Packet Switching
Parallel Computing, Origin Year1966
Parallel Computing, Fields
Standing
Concerns Origin Year
Currently States 1966
Michael Flynn's 1966 taxonomy is the field's most commonly cited defining moment, but the Gamma 60, the first architecture specifically designed for parallelism, was already built in 1957; no single year cleanly founds the field.
Source Wikipedia: Parallel computing
Pattern Recognition, Origin Year1936
Pattern Recognition, Fields
Standing
Concerns Origin Year
Currently States 1936
Marks a statistical precursor (Fisher's discriminant analysis); pattern recognition as a named computing field developed later.
Source Wikipedia: Pattern recognition