Brain Marshall. The Engineering Book: From the Catapult to the Curiosity Rover, 250 Milestones in the History of Engineering

Sterling, 2015. — 528 p. — (Sterling Milestones). — ISBN 9781454908098, 1454908092.Engineering is where human knowledge meets real-world problems—and solves them. It's the source of some of our greatest inventions, from the catapult to the jet engine. Marshall Brain, creator of the How Stuff Works series and a professor at the Engineering Entrepreneurs Program at NCSU, provides a detailed look at 250 milestones in the discipline. He covers the various areas, including chemical, aerospace, and computer engineering, from ancient history to the present. The topics include architectural wonders like the Acropolis, the Great Wall of China, and the Eiffel Tower; transportation advances such as the high-speed bullet train; medical innovations, including the artificial heart and kidney dialysis; developments in communications, such as the cell phone; as well as air conditioning, Wi-Fi, the Large Hadron Collider, the self-driving car, and more.Introduction.
Acknowledgments.
c. 2500 BCE Sumerian Abacus.
c. 700 BCE Scytale.
c. 150 BCE Antikythera Mechanism.
c. 60 Programmable Robot.
c. 850 On Deciphering Cryptographic Messages.
c. 1470 Cipher Disk.
1613 First Recorded Use of the Word Computer.
1621 Slide Rule.
1703 Binary Arithmetic.
1758 Human Computers Predict Halley’s Comet.
1770 The «Mechanical Turk».
1792 Optical Telegraph.
1801 The Jacquard Loom.
1822 The Difference Engine.
1836 Electrical Telegraph.
1843 Ada Lovelace Writes a Computer Program.
1843 Fax Machine Patented.
1843 Edgar Allan Poe’s «The Gold-Bug».
1851 Thomas Arithmometer.
1854 Boolean Algebra.
1864 First Electromagnetic Spam Message.
1874 Baudot Code.
1874 Semiconductor Diode.
1890 Tabulating the US Census.
1891 Strowger Step-by-Step Switch.
1914 Floating-Point Numbers.
1917 Vernam Cipher.
1920 Rossum’s Universal Robots.
1927 Metropolis.
1927 First LED.
1928 Electronic Speech Synthesis.
1931 Differential Analyzer.
1936 Church-Turing Thesis.
1941 Z3 Computer.
1942 Atanasoff-Berry Computer.
1942 Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics.
1943 ENIAC.
1943 Colossus.
1944 Delay Line Memory.
1944 Binary-Coded Decimal.
1945 «As We May Think».
1945 EDVAC First Draft Report.
1946 Trackball.
1946 Williams Tube.
1947 Actual Bug Found.
1947 Silicon Transistor.
1948 The Bit.
1948 Curta Calculator.
1948 Manchester SSEM.
1949 Whirlwind.
1950 Error-Correcting Codes.
1951 The Turing Test.
1951 Magnetic Tape Used for Computers.
1951 Core Memory.
1951 Microprogramming.
1952 Computer Speech Recognition.
1953 First Transistorized Computer.
1955 Artificial Intelligence Coined.
1955 Computer Proves Mathematical Theorem.
1956 First Disk Storage Unit.
1956 The Byte.
1956 Robby the Robot.
1957 FORTRAN.
1957 First Digital Image.
1958 The Bell 101 Modem.
1958 SAGE Computer Operational.
1959 IBM 1401.
1959 PDP-1.
1959 Quicksort.
1959 Airline Reservation System.
1960 COBOL Computer Language.
1960 Recommended Standard 232.
1961 ANITA Electronic Calculator.
1961 Unimate: First Mass-Produced Robot.
1961 Time-Sharing.
1962 Spacewar!
1962 Virtual Memory.
1962 Digital Long Distance.
1963 Sketchpad.
1963 ASCII.
1964 RAND Tablet.
1964 Teletype Model 33 ASR.
1964 IBM System/360.
1964 BASIC Computer Language.
1965 First Liquid-Crystal Display.
1965 Fiber Optics.
1965 DENDRAL.
1965 ELIZA.
1965 Touchscreen.
1966 Star Trek Premieres.
1966 Dynamic RAM.
1967 Object-Oriented Programming.
1967 First Cash Machine.
1967 Head-Mounted Display.
1967 Programming for Children.
1967 The Mouse.
1968 Carterfone Decision.
1968 Software Engineering.
1968 HAL 9000 Computer.
1968 First Spacecraft Guided by Computer.
1968 Cyberspace Coined—and Re-Coined.
1968 Mother of All Demos.
1968 Dot Matrix Printer.
1968 Interface Message Processor (IMP).
1969 ARPANET/Internet.
1969 Digital Imaging.
1969 Network Working Group Request for Comments: 1.
1969 Utility Computing.
1969 Perceptrons.
1969 Unix.
1970 Fair Credit Reporting Act.
1970 Relational Database.
1970 Floppy Disk.
1971 Laser Printer.
1971 NP-Completeness.
1971 @Mail.
1971 First Microprocessor.
1971 First Wireless Network.
1972 C Programming Language.
1972 Cray Research.
1972 Game of Life.
1972 HP-35 Calculator.
1972 Pong.
1973 First Cell Phone Call.
1973 Xerox Alto.
1974 Data Encryption Standard.
1974 First Personal Computer.
1975 Adventure.
1975 The Shockwave Rider.
1975 AI Medical Diagnosis.
1975 BYTE Magazine.
1975 Homebrew Computer Club.
1975 The Mythical Man-Month.
1976 Public Key Cryptography.
1976 Tandem NonStop.
1976 Dr. Dobb’s Journal.
1977 RSA Encryption.
1977 Apple II.
1978 First Internet Spam Message.
1978 Minitel.
1979 Secret Sharing.
1979 VisiCalc.
1980 Sinclair ZX80.
1980 Flash Memory.
1980 RISC.
1980 Commercially Available Ethernet.
1980 Usenet.
1981 IBM PC.
1981 Simple Mail Transfer Protocol.
1981 Japan’s Fifth Generation Computer Systems.
1982 AutoCAD.
1982 First Commercial Unix Workstation.
1982 PostScript.
1982 Microsoft and the Clones.
1982 First CGI Sequence in Feature Film.
1982 National Geographic Moves the Pyramids.
1982 Secure Multi-Party Computation.
1982 TRON.
1982 Home Computer Named Machine of the Year.
1983 The Qubit.
1983 WarGames.
1983 3-D Printing.
1983 Computerization of the Local Telephone Network.
1983 First Laptop.
1983 MIDI Computer Music Interface.
1983 Microsoft Word.
1983 Nintendo Entertainment System.
1983 Domain Name System.
1983 IPv4 Flag Day.
1984 Text-to-Speech.
1984 Macintosh.
1984 VPL Research, Inc.
1984 Quantum Cryptography.
1984 Telebit Modems Break 9600 bps.
1984 Verilog.
1985 Connection Machine.
1985 First Computer-Generated TV Host.
1985 Zero-Knowledge Proofs.
1985 FCC Approves Unlicensed Spread Spectrum.
1985 NSFNET.
1985 Desktop Publishing.
1985 Field-Programmable Gate Array.
1985 GNU Manifesto.
1985 AFIS Stops a Serial Killer.
1986 Software Bug Fatalities.
1986 Pixar.
1987 Digital Video Editing.
1987 GIF.
1988 MPEG.
1988 CD-ROM.
1988 Morris Worm.
1989 World Wide Web.
1989 SimCity.
1989 ISP Provides Internet Access to the Public.
1990 GPS Is Operational.
1990 Digital Money.
1991 Pretty Good Privacy (PGP).
1991 Computers at Risk.
1991 Linux Kernel.
1992 Boston Dynamics Founded.
1992 JPEG.
1992 First Mass-Market Web Browser.
1992 Unicode.
1993 Apple Newton.
1994 First Banner Ad.
1994 RSA-129 Cracked.
1995 DVD.
1995 E-Commerce.
1995 AltaVista Web Search Engine.
1995 Gartner Hype Cycle.
1996 Universal Serial Bus (USB).
1997 Computer Is World Chess Champion.
1997 PalmPilot.
1997 E Ink.
1998 Diamond Rio MP3 Player.
1998 Google.
1999 Collaborative Software Development.
1999 Blog Is Coined.
1999 Napster.
2000 USB Flash Drive.
2001 Wikipedia.
2001 iTunes.
2001 Advanced Encryption Standard.
2001 Quantum Computer Factors “15”.
2002 Home-Cleaning Robot.
2003 CAPTCHA.
2004 Product Tracking.
2004 Facebook.
2004 First International Meeting on Synthetic Biology.
2005 Video Game Enables Research into Real-World Pandemics.
2006 Hadoop Makes Big Data Possible.
2006 Differential Privacy.
2007 iPhone.
2008 Bitcoin.
2010 Air Force Builds Supercomputer with Gaming Consoles.
2010 Cyber Weapons.
2011 Smart Homes.
2011 Watson Wins Jeopardy!
2011 World IPv6 Day.
2011 Social Media Enables the Arab Spring.
2012 DNA Data Storage.
2013 Algorithm Influences Prison Sentence.
2013 Subscription Software.
2014 Data Breaches.
2014 Over-the-Air Vehicle Software Updates.
2015 Google Releases TensorFlow.
2016 Augmented Reality Goes Mainstream.
2016 Computer Beats Master at Go.
~2050 Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).
~9999 The Limits of Computation?
Notes and Further Reading.
Photo Credits.