As part of a series of posts that I’ve been calling “Open Source PhD,” I’m posting some of the materials that I prepared as I was studying for my comprehensive exams. You can see the reading lists for those exams here.

For the social history of computing field, I prepared a fully annotated history of computing from my field sources. This document is biased in all the ways my field list itself is biased, and moreso because I only pulled out events that I thought I might need to reference or put in context.

You’ll also note that the timeline stops in the early 1990s. This is both where my sources started to dwindle and where my personal knowledge of computing kicks in. Like most of the rest of my work, this is released as Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (CC BY-NC-SA).

Computing Timeline