Atlas

"When information processing grows into knowledge processing, the true personal computer will reach beyond hardware and connect with a vaster source of power than that of electronic microcircuitry — the power of human minds working in concert."
"But what the software ancestors sought to create were tools to amplify the power of their own brains — machines to take over what they saw as the more mechanical aspects of thought."
- Babbage was the first true computer designer, and Ada was history's first programmer.
- George Boole invented a mathematical tool for future computer-builders — an "algebra of logic" that was used nearly a hundred years later to link the process of human reason to the operations of machines. The idea came to him in a flash of inspiration when he was walking across a meadow one day, at the age of seventeen, but it took him twenty years to teach himself enough mathematics to write The Laws of Thought.
- Alan Turing solved one of the most crucial mathematical problems of the modern era at the age of twenty-four, creating the theoretical basis for computation in the process. Then he became the top code-breaker in the world — when he wasn't bicycling around wearing a gas mask or running twenty miles with an alarm clock tied around his waist. If it hadn't been for the success of Turing's top-secret wartime mission, the Allies might have lost World War II. After the war, he created the field of artificial intelligence and laid down the foundations of the art and science of programming.
- John Von Neumann was one of history's most brilliant physicists, logicians, and mathematicians, as well as the software genius who invented the first electronic digital computer.
John von Neumann was the center of the group who created the "stored program" concept that made truly powerful computers possible, and he specified a template that is still used to design almost all computers — the "von Neumann architecture."
- Wiener's conception of cybernetics was partially derived from "pure" scientific work in mathematics, biology, and neurophysiology, and partially derived from the grimly applied science of designing automatic antiaircraft guns. Cybernetics was about the nature of control and communication systems in animals, humans, and machines.
- Claude Shannon, another lone-wolf genius, is still known to his neighbors in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for his skill at riding a motorcycle. In 1937, as a twenty-one-year-old graduate student, he showed that Boole's logical algebra was the perfect tool for analyzing the complex networks of switching circuits used in telephone systems and, later, in computers. During the war and afterward, Shannon established the mathematical foundation of information theory. Together with cybernetics, this collection of theorems about information and communication created a new way to understand people and machines — and established information as a cosmic fundamental, along with energy and matter.