The Atlas

A structured map of computing — the languages, systems, machines, papers, companies, and people we can account for. Where the wiki tells the stories, the Atlas draws the map. Every entry carries its source.

165Programming languagesFORTRAN to HolyC — families, dialects, corpses 72Operating systemsCTSS to TempleOS — kernels, lineages, wrecks 251PeopleLovelace to Torvalds — the humans behind the artifacts 73MachinesColossus to the Amiga — the iron it all ran on 36PapersTuring 1936 to Nakamoto — the documents that moved the field 69CompaniesIBM to Symbolics — the shops that built it, and the ones that folded ◈The treeEvery lineage drawn chronologically — descent solid, influence dashed ▬TimelineThe whole field as lifespan bars, colored by status

The taxonomy of endings

Everything in the Atlas carries a status. We use six, because "dead" is a diagnosis, not an insult: alive and maintenance speak for themselves; dormant means silence without a funeral; dead means declared, abandoned, or authorless; lost means no public source or binaries remain obtainable — a state Wikipedia has no word for; superseded means replaced by something that survived. The borderlands are where most software actually lives.

Latest entries

Tabulating Machine Company Superseded

Hollerith's punch-card company — the Census machine commercialized. Merged into the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company in 1911; renamed

IBM Alive

The computing industry's first and largest titan — tabulators to System/360 to System z, and home to FORTRAN, APL, SQL, RISC, and more of th

AT&T Alive

The Bell System parent — broken up by antitrust decree in 1984, reassembled in pieces. Its research arm, Bell Labs, gave the world the trans

Bell Labs Alive

The most productive research organization in computing history — transistor, information theory, Unix, C, C++, the laser. Nine Nobel Prizes;

Remington Rand Superseded

The office-machine giant that bought Eckert–Mauchly's little startup in 1950 and shipped UNIVAC — then merged with Sperry in 1955.

Eckert–Mauchly Computer Corporation Superseded

The first American computer company — BINAC and UNIVAC — founded by the ENIAC engineers. Run out of money, bought by Remington Rand in 1950.

Seeded and verified by hand; edges and dates carry sources. Read the taxonomy essay →