I was entering the miseries of seventh grade in the fall of 1980 when a friend dragged me into a dimly lit second-floor room. The school had recently installed a newfangled Commodore PET computer, a ...

The first known use of the word “computer” was in 1613 in a book called The Yong Mans Gleanings by English writer Richard Braithwaite. In it he said, “I haue read the truest computer of Times, and the ...

IN DECEMBER 1989 Guido van Rossum, a Dutch computer scientist, set himself a Christmas project. Irked by shortcomings in other programming languages, he wanted to build his own. His principles were ...

For decades, fierce debates have raged over the benefits of different programming languages over others: Java vs. C++; Python vs. Ruby; Flask vs. Django. While often waged with fervor by computer ...

This video is part of Electronic Design's 70th Anniversary series. This is a bit like Mel Brooks History of the World, Part I for programmers. I've been writing a number of articles and recording ...

The abacus, a simple counting aid, may have been invented in Babylonia (now Iraq) in the fourth century B.C. The Antikythera mechanism, used for registering and predicting the motion of the stars and ...

Expert computer programmers show higher proficiency in certain behavioral and attention skills than their novice peers. To identify the responsible brain regions, scientists used fMRI to analyze the ...