This essay is a survey of computing history, made initially as part of my literature review for my dissertation on geodemographics. However my supervisor advised that it strayed too far from issues of relevance to a Geography PhD.
The essay covers computing's early precursors such as Babbage's Difference Engine and Hollerith's Tabulating Machine; the key theoretical breakthroughs made by Church, Turing and Shannon; the hardware developments predicted by Moore's Law and the lesser-known Bell's Law; some important issues in the progress of software; and the foundations of AI and Machine Learning.
To generate the pdf from markdown, I use Pandoc running in a Docker container, as set up here.