Ab... - The Universal History Of Computing: From The

In a small, dust-mote-filled workshop in 17th-century France, young Blaise Pascal watched his father, a tax collector, labor over endless columns of figures. The scratching of the quill was the only sound, a rhythmic reminder of the grueling human effort required to process the world’s data.

Today, we no longer hear the click of Pascal’s gears or the hum of mainframe tubes, but every time you tap a screen, you are echoing a journey that began with a single bead on a wooden frame. We have moved from calculating taxes to simulating universes, all by teaching inanimate matter how to "think." The Universal History of Computing: From the Ab...

By the mid-20th century, the gears turned into vacuum tubes and then silicon. The room-sized gave way to the microprocessor, shrinking the power of a thousand mathematicians into a chip smaller than a fingernail. We have moved from calculating taxes to simulating