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.
38 statements marked Debated.
Algorithm, Origin Year1936
Algorithm, Concepts
Standing
Concerns Origin Year
Currently States 1936
Informal algorithms are ancient practice, Euclid's algorithm dates to around 300 BCE; the formal mathematical definition of an algorithm as a precisely specified, mechanically followable procedure dates to 1936, when Turing and Church independently formalized computability.
Algorithms and Complexity Theory, Origin Year1936
Algorithms and Complexity Theory, Fields
Standing
Concerns Origin Year
Currently States 1936
Informal algorithms are ancient, Euclid's algorithm dates to around 300 BCE, but the field as a distinct mathematical discipline is usually dated to 1936, when Alan Turing and, independently, Alonzo Church gave the first formal definitions of what it means for a procedure to be computable at all.
Assembly Language, First Released1947
Assembly Language, Languages
Standing
Concerns First Released
Currently States 1947
Assembly language has no single agreed year or inventor. Kathleen and Andrew Donald Booth's 1947 Coding for A.R.C. is the earliest documented work using a language to represent machine code instructions symbolically, but the term assembler itself is usually credited to Wilkes, Wheeler and Gill's 1951 book, and similar mnemonic coding schemes emerged independently on other early machines in the same years. 1947 is used here as the earliest documented instance, not as a settled single origin.
Source Wikipedia: Assembly language
Atanasoff Berry Computer, SignificanceThe first automatic electronic digital computer, with priority backed by the 1973 Honeywell v. Sperry Rand finding; historians debate the title because the machine was neither programmable nor Turing complete.
Atanasoff Berry Computer, Systems
Standing
Concerns Significance
Currently States The first automatic electronic digital computer, with priority backed by the 1973 Honeywell v. Sperry Rand finding; historians debate the title because the machine was neither programmable nor Turing complete.
The 1973 court finding is a matter of public record; the historians' debate over whether a non programmable machine can hold the title is equally on the record. Both are stated rather than smoothed over.
Source Wikipedia: Atanasoff Berry Computer
Binary Search Tree, Origin Year1960
Binary Search Tree, Concepts
Standing
Concerns Origin Year
Currently States 1960
Several researchers (Windley, Booth, Colin, Hibbard) described the structure independently around 1960; formal attribution to Berners-Lee and Wheeler names one specific 1960 application (magnetic tape storage) rather than settling a single inventor for the underlying idea.
Source Wikipedia: Binary search tree
Client-Server Model, Origin Year1964
Client-Server Model, Concepts
Standing
Concerns Origin Year
Currently States 1964
The underlying request-and-response division of labor is visible by 1964 (OS/360 remote job entry) and the server-host/user-host terminology by the early ARPANET RFCs, but the word client was not formally defined until a 1978 Xerox PARC paper and server only entered general use by 1992; no single year cleanly founds the model.
Source Wikipedia: Client-server model
Cryptography, Origin Year1976
Cryptography, Fields
Standing
Concerns Origin Year
Currently States 1976
Cryptography as a practice is ancient, but its treatment as a computational academic field is usually dated to the 1970s: the Data Encryption Standard effort of the early 1970s and the 1976 Diffie-Hellman publication that opened public key cryptography, so the origin year depends on whether the ancient practice or the modern computational field is being dated.
Source Wikipedia: Cryptography
Distributed Computing, Core ConcernWhich computational problems can be solved across networks of independent computers, and how efficiently, given that components communicate only by passing messages and may fail independently.
Distributed Computing, Fields
Standing
Concerns Core Concern
Currently States Which computational problems can be solved across networks of independent computers, and how efficiently, given that components communicate only by passing messages and may fail independently.
The article itself states there is no single agreed definition of a distributed system, and no clear line separates distributed computing from concurrent and parallel computing.
Source Wikipedia: Distributed Computing
Dynamic Programming, Core PrincipleProblems exhibiting optimal substructure and overlapping sub-problems can be solved efficiently by recursive decomposition combined with caching of intermediate results, developed by Richard Bellman in the 1950s.
Dynamic Programming, Concepts
Standing
Concerns Core Principle
Currently States Problems exhibiting optimal substructure and overlapping sub-problems can be solved efficiently by recursive decomposition combined with caching of intermediate results, developed by Richard Bellman in the 1950s.
Bellman's own account of why he chose the name dynamic programming is contested: Russell and Norvig note his story cannot be strictly true, since his first paper using the term (1952) predates the political circumstances he described, and Harold Kushner has suggested other motives, such as wanting to distinguish the work from Dantzig's linear programming.
Source Wikipedia: Dynamic Programming
Embedded Systems, Origin Year1961
Embedded Systems, Fields
Standing
Concerns Origin Year
Currently States 1961
The Autonetics D-17 (1961, Minuteman missile guidance, mass-produced) predates the more commonly cited Apollo Guidance Computer (circa 1965), which sources describe as the first RECOGNIZABLY MODERN embedded system rather than the first one outright; the field has no single undisputed founding year.
Source Wikipedia: Embedded system
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.
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)
Graydon Hoare, NationalityCanadian
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
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.
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