Atlas
A trail is a short, ordered route through the atlas. Each stop says why it comes next, so a journey reads as an argument rather than a list. Start one, leave, and come back: your place is kept in this browser, and you do not need an account for that.
Software frameworks let developers stop rebuilding the same scaffolding for every project. This path follows eight frameworks in the order they first appeared, from Java's enterprise-grade Spring Framework in 2002...
8 stops
This trail moves through computing's own fields in the order each built on what came before, from the algorithmic theory that gives the field its shared vocabulary of running time and correctness, through the machines...
15 stops
Ten algorithms spanning more than two thousand years, from an ancient method for finding the largest number that divides two others evenly to the formula that ranked the early web: each one solved a real problem so well...
10 stops
Eight stops through computing's great priority dispute: a Victorian design on paper, a court case, a machine kept secret for thirty years, and the June morning in Manchester when software first lived in memory. Nobody...
12 stops
Object oriented programming did not arrive from one place. This trail follows the atlas's own disputed record of its birth, from Simula's classes and inheritance in Norway to Alan Kay's Smalltalk at Xerox PARC, and on...
9 stops
Two classic algorithms, the pioneers who invented them, and the notation and open questions computer scientists use to judge how efficient an algorithm really is. This trail moves from what a computer can compute at all...
9 stops
A computer is, underneath every algorithm, a machine built from controlled matter. This trail follows that physical layer from the 1947 invention that replaced the vacuum tube, through the industry law that predicted...
5 stops
Trails are curated by the atlas. Where you have got to in one is remembered by your own browser and is never sent to us.