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First Principles · A–Z

A–Z index

Everything in the record, alphabetically. Written entries in full colour; stubs in grey.

13 written · 525 catalogued

A

Accel Early backer of Facebook and Slack. Ada Lovelace English mathematician (1815–1852), author of the first published algorithm for a machine. Adele Goldberg American computer scientist (b. 1945), co-creator of Smalltalk. Adobe PARC spinout behind PostScript, Photoshop and PDF. Agentic AI Models that plan and take actions over time. AI Alignment Making systems pursue what we actually intend. AI Interpretability Understanding what is happening inside a model. The AI Winters Two collapses of funding and belief, in the 1970s and late 1980s. Airbnb Marketplace that turned homes into lodging. Alan Kay American computer scientist (b. 1940), architect of the personal computer as we know it. Alan Turing British mathematician (1912–1954) who defined computation and helped break Enigma. Alec Radford American researcher behind GPT, CLIP and Whisper. Alex Krizhevsky Ukrainian-Canadian researcher, author of AlexNet. Algorithm A finite, unambiguous procedure for producing a result. Allen Newell American researcher (1927–1992), co-author of the first AI programs. Alonzo Church American logician (1903–1995), inventor of the lambda calculus. AlphaGo The 2016 system that beat Lee Sedol at Go. Altera FPGA maker, later absorbed by Intel. Amazon Founded 1994; the store that became the cloud. AMD Founded 1969; Intel's long-running rival. Amit Singhal Indian-American engineer (b. 1968) who long owned Google's search ranking. Anders Hejlsberg Danish engineer (b. 1960), creator of Turbo Pascal, C# and TypeScript. Andreessen Horowitz Founded 2009; the firm that made VCs into media. Andrej Karpathy Slovak-Canadian researcher (b. 1986), teacher and builder of neural nets. Andrew Grove Hungarian-American executive (1936–2016) who turned Intel into a microprocessor company. Andrew Ng British-American computer scientist (b. 1976), co-founder of Google Brain and Coursera. Andries van Dam Dutch-American computer scientist (b. 1938), a founder of hypertext research. Android The open mobile OS that took the rest of the market. Andy Hertzfeld American programmer (b. 1953), a principal author of the original Mac system software. Andy Jassy American executive (b. 1968), founder of AWS and Amazon's second CEO. Andy Rubin American engineer (b. 1963), co-founder of Android. Anthropic Founded 2021; Claude and Constitutional AI. AOL The on-ramp that brought millions online. APIs Defined seams that let software build on software. App Store Curated software distribution, and a new economy. Apple Founded 1976; the Apple II, Macintosh and iPhone. Apple Newton The handheld that was right about everything but timing. Applied Materials American supplier of chip fabrication equipment. AR / VR Interfaces that place computation in space. ARM British designer of the world's most-used instruction set. ARM Architecture The efficient instruction set that won mobile and is taking servers. ARPA (now DARPA) The U.S. defense research agency that funded the ARPANET. ARPANET The 1969 research network that became the internet. Arthur Rock American investor (b. 1926) who financed Fairchild, Intel and Apple. Artificial Intelligence The field McCarthy named in 1955. Ashish Vaswani & Noam Shazeer Lead authors of “Attention Is All You Need,” the transformer paper. ASIC A chip built for exactly one job. ASML Dutch maker of the EUV machines no one else can build. Atari Arcade and console pioneer founded in 1972. Attention Mechanism Letting a model weigh what matters in its input. Augmentation Research Center (ARC) Engelbart's laboratory at SRI, the team that built NLS and staged the 1968 demonstration. Augmenting Human Intellect Engelbart's 1962 conceptual framework: the computer as amplifier of human capability rather than automator of calculation. Avie Tevanian American engineer (b. 1961), architect of Mac OS X's core. AWS Amazon's 2006 launch that created the cloud market.

B

Backpropagation The algorithm that makes deep networks trainable. Barbara Liskov American computer scientist (b. 1939) who shaped data abstraction and distributed systems. BASIC The language that taught a generation to program. Bell Labs AT&T's research arm — the transistor, information theory, UNIX and C. Benchmark Small, equal-partnership firm behind eBay and Uber. Benjamin Black & Chris Pinkham Engineers whose 2003 memo became EC2 and, with it, the cloud. Bertrand Russell British philosopher (1872–1970) who tried to ground mathematics in logic. Bertrand Serlet French engineer (b. 1960) who led Mac OS X engineering. Bill Atkinson American programmer (1951–2025) behind QuickDraw and HyperCard. Bill English American engineer (1929–2020) who co-invented the mouse with Engelbart and built the first prototype in 1964. Bill Gates American entrepreneur (b. 1955), co-founder of Microsoft. Bill Joy American computer scientist (b. 1954), co-founder of Sun and author of BSD utilities. Bill Paxton American researcher at SRI's Augmentation Research Center, one of the two remote faces in the 1968 demo. Bjarne Stroustrup Danish computer scientist (b. 1950), creator of C++. Bletchley Park Britain's wartime codebreaking site, where Colossus ran. Blockchain Append-only ledgers without a central keeper. Bluetooth Short-range wireless for devices. Bob Kahn American engineer (b. 1938), co-designer of TCP/IP. Bob Metcalfe American engineer (b. 1946), co-inventor of Ethernet. Bob Taylor American internet and computing pioneer (1932–2017). Boolean Algebra The algebra of true and false that circuits are built on. Bootstrapping Engelbart's central loop: using tools to get better at improving tools, compounding collective IQ. Brian Chesky American entrepreneur (b. 1981), co-founder of Airbnb. Brian Kernighan Canadian computer scientist (b. 1942), co-author of the book that taught the world C. Broadcom American designer of networking and custom AI silicon. Browser The program that made the web usable by everyone. Bud Tribble American engineer (b. 1953), original Macintosh software manager. Butler Lampson American computer scientist (b. 1943), co-designer of the Alto.

C

C Ritchie's language, still the substrate of everything. C++ Objects with C's performance. Caching & Memory Hierarchy Keeping the data you need close and fast. Caltech American institute where Carver Mead formalized VLSI. Carnegie Mellon University American university, home of Newell, Simon and early AI. Carver Mead American engineer (b. 1934) who named Moore's law and founded VLSI design. CDNs Caching content near the people asking for it. Cellular Networks & 5G The mobile infrastructure behind the smartphone. CERN European physics laboratory where the web was invented. Chain-of-Thought Reasoning Getting better answers by making models show their work. Charles Babbage English inventor (1791–1871) who designed the first mechanical general-purpose computer. Charles Simonyi Hungarian-American programmer (b. 1948), PARC alumnus and father of Word and Excel. Chris Olah Canadian researcher, pioneer of neural network interpretability. Chuck Thacker American computer designer (1943–2017), a lead designer of the Xerox Alto — the first personal computer with a graphical interface. CISC Rich instruction sets that do more per instruction. Cisco Router company that built the commercial internet's plumbing. Claude Shannon American mathematician (1916–2001), founder of information theory. Cloud Computing Computing as a metered utility. CMOS The low-power logic family that all modern chips use. COBOL Business computing's language, still running the banks. Cohere Canadian company focused on enterprise language models. Command Line The text interface that never went away. Commodore Maker of the best-selling Commodore 64. Compaq PC-compatible maker whose clean-room BIOS broke IBM's lock. Compilers Programs that translate human languages into machine code. Complexity Theory (P vs NP) The study of what is computable in practice, not just in principle. Computability What can and cannot be computed, in principle. Computer Mouse The pointing device Engelbart and English built in 1964. Computer Vision Teaching machines to interpret images. Constitutional AI Training a model against an explicit written set of principles. Containers Lightweight, portable packaging for software. Convolutional Neural Networks Architecture that made machine vision work. Cut / Copy / Paste Tesler's universal editing gesture.

D

Dan Bricklin & Bob Frankston American programmers who wrote VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet. Daniela Amodei American executive (b. 1987), co-founder and president of Anthropic. Dario Amodei American researcher (b. 1983), co-founder and CEO of Anthropic. Data Centers The buildings where the cloud actually is. Data Warehousing Centralized analytical stores for business questions. Dave Cutler American engineer (b. 1942), architect of VMS and Windows NT. David Hilbert German mathematician (1862–1943) whose program framed the questions Gödel and Turing answered. David Silver British researcher (b. 1976), lead of AlphaGo. DEC Digital Equipment Corporation, maker of the PDP and VAX. Deep Learning Many-layered networks trained on large data. DeepMind London AI lab founded in 2010, known for AlphaGo and AlphaFold. Dell Direct-sales PC maker founded in 1984. Demis Hassabis British researcher (b. 1976), co-founder of DeepMind. Dennard Scaling The power-scaling rule whose end forced multicore. Dennis Ritchie American computer scientist (1941–2011), creator of C and co-creator of UNIX. Desktop Metaphor Files, folders and a trash can on a virtual desk. Diane Greene American entrepreneur (b. 1955), co-founder of VMware. Diffusion Models Generating images by reversing noise. Dimensional Analysis & Pi Terms The method behind similitude — reducing a system to dimensionless ratios that hold across scales. Distributed Consensus Paxos, Raft, and agreeing when machines fail. DNS The naming system that turns words into addresses. Don Norman American cognitive scientist (b. 1935), author of The Design of Everyday Things. Don Valentine American investor (1932–2019), founder of Sequoia Capital. Donald Davies Welsh computer scientist (1924–2000) who coined “packet switching.” Donald Knuth American computer scientist (b. 1938), author of The Art of Computer Programming. Douglas Engelbart American engineer (1925–2013) and pioneer of human–computer interaction. DRAM Cheap, dense volatile memory — the computer's working space.

E

eBay Founded 1995; the internet's first great marketplace. Ed Catmull American computer scientist (b. 1945), co-founder of Pixar. Edgar F. Codd English computer scientist (1923–2003), inventor of the relational model. Edsger W. Dijkstra Dutch computer scientist (1930–2002) and conscience of structured programming. Eli Harari Israeli-American engineer (b. 1945), co-founder of SanDisk and flash-memory pioneer. Elon Musk South African-American entrepreneur (b. 1971) behind Tesla, SpaceX and xAI. Emil Post American mathematician (1897–1954), independent discoverer of computability limits. Eric Bina American programmer (b. 1964), co-author of the Mosaic browser. Eric Schmidt American executive (b. 1955), Google's CEO through its rise. Error-Correcting Codes Mathematics that lets data survive a noisy world. ETH Zürich Swiss institute, home of Wirth and of Pascal. Ethernet Metcalfe's local network, still under every office floor. Euclid Greek mathematician (fl. c. 300 BC) whose Elements set the template for deductive proof. Eugene Kleiner Austrian-American engineer (1923–2003), Fairchild founder turned venture capitalist. Evan Williams American entrepreneur (b. 1972), co-founder of Blogger, Twitter and Medium. Expert Systems Rule-based AI, the commercial hope of the 1980s.

F

Fairchild Semiconductor A pioneering semiconductor company founded in 1957, the seedbed of Silicon Valley. Federico Faggin Italian-American physicist (b. 1941) who designed the Intel 4004 and Z80. Fei-Fei Li Chinese-American computer scientist (b. 1976), creator of ImageNet. Fiber Optics Glass and light carrying nearly all the world's data. Fine-Tuning Adapting a general model to a specific task. Flash Memory Non-volatile storage that made phones and SSDs possible. Format Wars Betamax, HD-DVD, and how standards actually get chosen. FORTRAN The first widely used high-level language. FPGA Reconfigurable logic, programmable after manufacture. Frances Allen American computer scientist (1932–2020), pioneer of optimizing compilers. Frank Rosenblatt American psychologist (1928–1971), inventor of the perceptron.

G

GANs Two networks competing to generate realistic data. Gary Starkweather American engineer (1938–2019) who invented the laser printer at Xerox — the one PARC invention Xerox sold, and the one that paid for the lab. Geoffrey Hinton British-Canadian scientist (b. 1947), a father of deep learning. George Boole English mathematician (1815–1864) who turned logic into algebra. Georges Doriot French-American financier (1899–1987), the father of venture capital. GitHub Where the world's source code lives. Glenn Murphy American engineering professor and author of “Similitude in Engineering” (The Ronald Press, 1950), the dimensional-analysis text that Engelbart's 1960 paper explicitly drew on — the source behind the source. Google Founded 1998; search, ads and much of the modern stack. Google Brain Google's deep learning group, birthplace of TensorFlow and the transformer. Google DeepMind Google's merged AI research organization. Google Glass & Google+ Distribution without desire. Gordon Moore American engineer (1929–2023), co-founder of Intel. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz German polymath (1646–1716), co-inventor of calculus and of binary arithmetic. Gottlob Frege German logician (1848–1925), founder of modern formal logic. GPS Satellite positioning, now assumed by everything. GPU Parallel graphics hardware that turned out to be an AI engine. Grace Hopper American computer scientist (1906–1992) who built the first compiler. Greg Brockman American engineer (b. 1987), co-founder of OpenAI. Greylock One of the oldest American venture firms. GUI The graphical interface, from the Alto to everything after. Guido van Rossum Dutch programmer (b. 1956), creator of Python.

H

Hard Disk Drive Spinning magnetic storage, from IBM's 1956 RAMAC onward. Herbert Simon American polymath (1916–2001), Nobel laureate and AI pioneer. Homebrew Computer Club The Bay Area hobbyist club that produced the Apple I. HP The original Silicon Valley garage company, founded 1939. HTML The markup that describes a web page. HTTP The web's request-and-response protocol. Hugging Face The open model hub and community. Hypermedia Linked media beyond text. Hypertext Text with links — Nelson's word, the web's foundation. Hypervisors The layer that lets many machines share one.

I

Ian Goodfellow American researcher (b. 1987), inventor of GANs. IBM The company that defined the mainframe and then the PC standard. IBM OS/2 The technically better PC operating system that lost anyway. IBM Research IBM's laboratories, source of the relational model, DRAM and Deep Blue. Icons Small pictures standing in for objects and actions. Ilya Sutskever Israeli-Canadian researcher (b. 1986), co-author of AlexNet and co-founder of OpenAI. ImageNet The dataset and contest that launched deep learning's decade. Inflection AI Consumer AI company founded by Suleyman. Information Theory Shannon's mathematics of bits, entropy and channel capacity. Infrastructure as Code Declaring infrastructure in versioned files. Institute for Advanced Study Princeton institute where von Neumann built his machine. Integrated Circuit Many transistors on a single piece of silicon. Intel Founded 1968; maker of the first microprocessor. Intel Itanium A bet on a new architecture that the market declined. Intersil Early analog and radiation-hardened chip maker. iPhone The 2007 product that reset the industry. Irwin Jacobs American engineer (b. 1933), co-founder of Qualcomm. ISSCC The International Solid-State Circuits Conference, where Engelbart presented the similitude paper in February 1960. Ivan Sutherland American computer scientist (b. 1938), creator of Sketchpad and pioneer of computer graphics.

J

J. R. Nall Fairchild Semiconductor engineer who chaired Session VII at the 1960 ISSCC — the session in which Engelbart delivered the similitude paper. J.C.R. Licklider American psychologist (1915–1990) who funded and foresaw interactive computing and networks. Jack Dorsey American entrepreneur (b. 1976), co-founder of Twitter and Square. Jack Kilby American engineer (1923–2005) who built the first integrated circuit at Texas Instruments. James Gosling Canadian computer scientist (b. 1955), creator of Java. James Hamilton Canadian engineer, designer of AWS's hardware and data centers. Jared Kaplan American physicist, co-author of the neural scaling laws. Java Write once, run anywhere — and the enterprise's default. JavaScript Written in ten days; now the language of the web. Jean Hoerni Swiss-American physicist (1924–1997), inventor of the planar process. Jef Raskin American interface expert (1943–2005) who started the Macintosh project. Jeff Bezos American entrepreneur (b. 1964), founder of Amazon. Jeff Dean American computer scientist (b. 1968), architect of Google's infrastructure and Brain. Jeff Rulifson American computer scientist, lead software architect of NLS and author of RFC 5. Jensen Huang Taiwanese-American executive (b. 1963), co-founder of NVIDIA. Jerry Sanders American executive (b. 1936), founder of AMD. Jerry Yang & David Filo Stanford students whose directory became Yahoo. Jim Allchin American executive (b. 1951) who ran Windows through its dominant years. Jim Blinn American computer graphics researcher (b. 1949) whose shading models are everywhere. Jim Clark American entrepreneur (b. 1944), founder of Silicon Graphics and Netscape. Jim Gray American computer scientist (1944–2007) who made database transactions reliable. Jimmy Wales American entrepreneur (b. 1966), co-founder of Wikipedia. John Backus American computer scientist (1924–2007), leader of the FORTRAN team. John Bardeen American physicist (1908–1991), twice a Nobel laureate, co-inventor of the transistor. John Carmack American programmer (b. 1970) behind Doom, Quake and modern 3D engines. John Doerr American investor (b. 1951) who funded Netscape, Amazon and Google. John Hopfield American physicist (b. 1933) whose networks revived neural computing. John Markoff American journalist (b. 1949) who chronicled the personal computer's counterculture roots. John McCarthy American computer scientist (1927–2011) who coined “artificial intelligence” and created LISP. John Schulman American researcher (b. 1988), co-author of PPO and RLHF. John von Neumann Hungarian-American polymath (1903–1957) whose architecture underlies nearly every computer. John Warnock & Charles Geschke PARC alumni who founded Adobe and invented PostScript. Johny Srouji Israeli engineer (b. 1964) who built Apple's own silicon. Jon Postel American computer scientist (1943–1998), keeper of the internet's numbers and names. Jony Ive British designer (b. 1967) behind the iMac, iPod and iPhone. Joseph Weizenbaum German-American computer scientist (1923–2008), author of ELIZA and its first critic. Judea Pearl Israeli-American computer scientist (b. 1936), founder of causal inference. Jürgen Schmidhuber & Sepp Hochreiter German and Austrian researchers who invented the LSTM.

K

Karen Spärck Jones British computer scientist (1935–2007) whose TF-IDF underpins search. Ken Thompson American computer scientist (b. 1943), co-creator of UNIX and B. Khosla Ventures Founded 2004; deep tech and early OpenAI backer. Kleiner Perkins Founded 1972; backed Genentech, Netscape and Google. Knowledge Graph Structured entities and relations behind search answers. Konrad Zuse German engineer (1910–1995) who built the first programmable computer, the Z3. Krishna Bharat Indian-American computer scientist, creator of Google News. Kubernetes Google's orchestration system, now the industry default. Kurt Gödel Austrian logician (1906–1978) who proved the limits of formal systems.

L

Lambda Calculus Church's model of computation as pure function application. Large Language Models Models trained to predict text, and much else besides. Larry Ellison American entrepreneur (b. 1944), co-founder of Oracle. Larry Page American entrepreneur (b. 1973), co-founder of Google and co-author of PageRank. Larry Tesler American computer scientist (1945–2020) who gave us cut, copy and paste. Laser Printer PARC's invention that paid for everything else PARC did. Lee de Forest American inventor (1873–1961) of the triode vacuum tube. Leonard Kleinrock American engineer (b. 1934) whose lab sent the first ARPANET message. Leslie Lamport American computer scientist (b. 1941), author of Paxos and LaTeX. Linus Torvalds Finnish-American programmer (b. 1969), creator of Linux and Git. Linux The open kernel that runs the internet. Lisa Su Taiwanese-American engineer (b. 1969) who rebuilt AMD. LISP McCarthy's language of lists, symbols and self-modifying code. Lisp Machines Purpose-built AI hardware made obsolete by general workstations. Los Alamos National Laboratory American weapons lab and early proving ground for scientific computing. LSI Logic Pioneer of custom ASIC design.

M

Machine Learning Programs that improve from data rather than instruction. Macintosh The 1984 machine that carried the graphical interface onto an ordinary desk. macOS NeXT's Unix underneath, Apple's interface on top. Magnetic Core Memory Woven magnetic rings that stored bits before silicon. MapReduce, GFS & BigTable Google's papers that created the big data industry. Marc Andreessen American entrepreneur (b. 1971), co-author of Mosaic and co-founder of Netscape. Marc Benioff American entrepreneur (b. 1964), founder of Salesforce and evangelist of SaaS. Mark Zuckerberg American entrepreneur (b. 1984), founder of Facebook. Martin Hellman American cryptographer (b. 1945), co-inventor of public-key cryptography. Marvin Minsky American cognitive scientist (1927–2016), co-founder of the MIT AI Lab. Masatoshi Shima Japanese engineer (b. 1943), co-designer of the 4004 and 8080. Masayoshi Son Japanese investor (b. 1957), founder of SoftBank. Massachusetts Institute of Technology American institute whose labs seeded AI, networking and much else. Maurice Wilkes British computer scientist (1913–2010), builder of EDSAC and inventor of microcode. Menlo Park, California A city on the San Francisco Peninsula, in the heart of what became Silicon Valley. Menus Discoverable lists of commands. Meta Facebook, Instagram and the largest open model program. Meta AI Meta's research lab and home of the Llama models. Michael Moritz Welsh investor (b. 1954), the journalist who backed Google and PayPal. Michael Stonebraker American computer scientist (b. 1943) behind Ingres, Postgres and much else. Microcode The layer of interpretation inside the processor itself. Microelectronics and the Art of Similitude Engelbart's two-page 1960 ISSCC paper arguing that each new scale breaks the old rules and opens new possibilities. Micron American memory manufacturer founded in 1978. Microprocessor A whole computer's logic on one chip. Microservices Systems built from small independent services. Microsoft Founded 1975; DOS, Windows, Office and Azure. Midjourney Image generation studio with a distinctive house style. Mike Markkula American investor (b. 1942) whose money and marketing plan made Apple a company. Minitel France's national network that worked too well to be replaced. Mistral AI French lab known for efficient open-weight models. MIT AI Lab & Media Lab MIT's two engines of AI, hacker culture and interface research. Mitch Kapor American entrepreneur (b. 1950), founder of Lotus. Mixture of Experts Routing each input to a subset of the model. Mobile Payments The phone as wallet. Mobile SoC Whole systems on one low-power chip. Moore's Law The observation that became the industry's schedule. Morris Chang Taiwanese-American executive (b. 1931), founder of TSMC and the foundry model. MOS Technology Maker of the 6502 that powered the Apple II and NES. The Mother of All Demos The December 1968 San Francisco presentation of NLS — named years afterward by Steven Levy. Motorola Maker of the 68000 that powered the early Mac and Amiga. Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi Persian scholar (c. 780–850) whose name gave us the word algorithm. Multi-touch Interfaces that respond to more than one finger. Multicore Many processors on one die, once clock speed stalled. Multimodal AI Models that handle text, image, audio and video together. Mustafa Suleyman British entrepreneur (b. 1984), co-founder of DeepMind and Inflection.

N

NASA (Ames Research Center) The U.S. space agency's Silicon Valley laboratory. Nathan Myhrvold American scientist (b. 1959), founder of Microsoft Research. National Semiconductor Fairchild spinout and analog powerhouse. Netflix Mail-order DVDs turned streaming and cloud-native architecture. Netscape Founded 1994; the browser that opened the web to everyone. Neural Networks Layered computation loosely inspired by the brain. New York University American university, LeCun's base for convolutional networks. Nick Bostrom Swedish philosopher (b. 1973), author of Superintelligence. Niklaus Wirth Swiss computer scientist (1934–2024), creator of Pascal. Nintendo Japanese company that rebuilt the console industry after 1983. NLS (oN-Line System) The integrated system Engelbart's team built and demonstrated in 1968 — combining the mouse, on-screen windows, hypertext links, and real-time collaborative editing into one working environment decades ahead of its time. Nolan Bushnell American entrepreneur (b. 1943), founder of Atari. NoSQL Trading strict consistency for scale. NVIDIA Founded 1993; the GPU company that became the AI company.

O

Object-Oriented Programming Software structured as interacting objects. Open Source Licensing The legal machinery that made shared code sustainable. OpenAI Founded 2015; GPT, DALL·E and ChatGPT. Operating Systems The layer that manages hardware on every program's behalf. Oracle Database company founded in 1977. Oriol Vinyals Spanish researcher (b. 1982), of seq2seq and AlphaStar.

P

Package Managers Infrastructure for reusing other people's code. Packet Switching Breaking messages into pieces that find their own way. PageRank Ranking pages by who links to them. Parallel Computing Many processors working on one problem at once. Patrick & John Collison Irish brothers who founded Stripe. Paul Allen American entrepreneur (1953–2018), co-founder of Microsoft. Paul Baran Polish-American engineer (1926–2011), independent inventor of packet switching. Paul Christiano American researcher, a father of RLHF and of alignment theory. Paul Graham English programmer (b. 1964), co-founder of Y Combinator. PayPal Payments company whose alumni seeded a generation of startups. Perceptron Rosenblatt's 1958 learning machine, the first neural net. Perplexity AI-native search company. Peter Thiel American investor (b. 1967), co-founder of PayPal and Palantir. Phil Zimmermann American cryptographer (b. 1954), author of PGP. Photolithography & EUV Printing circuits with light — the hardest manufacturing on earth. Pierre Omidyar French-American entrepreneur (b. 1967), founder of eBay. Pipelining Overlapping instruction stages to raise throughput. Pixar The graphics company that became a film studio. Planar Process Hoerni's method that made mass-produced chips possible. Presper Eckert & John Mauchly American engineers who built ENIAC and the first commercial computer, UNIVAC. Princeton University American university where von Neumann, Gödel and Turing overlapped. Public-Key Cryptography Encryption without a shared secret. Punched Cards The first widely used medium for programs and data. Python The readable language that became AI's lingua franca.

Q

Qualcomm Wireless chip and patent powerhouse founded in 1985. Quantum Computing Computation using superposition and entanglement.

R

Radia Perlman American engineer (b. 1951), inventor of the spanning-tree protocol. Ralph Merkle American cryptographer (b. 1952), inventor of the hash tree. RAND Corporation American think tank where Baran designed packet switching. Ray Ozzie American programmer (b. 1955), creator of Lotus Notes and Microsoft's cloud strategist. Recommender Systems Algorithms that decide what you see next. Red Hat The company that made open source an enterprise business. Reed Hastings American entrepreneur (b. 1960), co-founder of Netflix. Reinforcement Learning Learning by acting and receiving reward. Relational Databases Codd's model of data as tables and relations. Retrieval-Augmented Generation Grounding generation in retrieved documents. Rich Sutton American computer scientist (b. 1978), father of modern reinforcement learning. Richard Stallman American programmer (b. 1953), founder of the free software movement. RISC Fewer, simpler instructions executed faster. Rivest, Shamir & Adleman The trio behind RSA, the algorithm that made secure commerce possible. RLHF Training models on human preference judgments. RNNs & LSTM Networks with memory, the pre-transformer standard for sequences. Rob Pike Canadian computer scientist (b. 1956), co-creator of Plan 9, UTF-8 and Go. Robert Cailliau Belgian engineer (b. 1947), Berners-Lee's collaborator at CERN. Robert Noyce American physicist (1927–1990), co-inventor of the integrated circuit and co-founder of Intel. Robin Rombach German researcher, lead author of latent diffusion — the basis of Stable Diffusion. Ronald Wayne American draftsman (b. 1934), Apple's third founder for twelve days. Routing Protocols How networks learn the shape of the internet.

S

Salar Kamangar American executive (b. 1977) who built Google's ad business. Salesforce Founded 1999; the company that proved software as a service. Sam Altman American entrepreneur (b. 1985), CEO of OpenAI. Samsung Electronics Korean giant in memory, displays and foundry. SanDisk Flash memory company founded in 1988. Sanjay Ghemawat Indian-American computer scientist (b. 1966), Dean's longtime collaborator. Satoshi Nakamoto Pseudonymous author of the Bitcoin white paper (2008); identity unknown. Satya Nadella Indian-American executive (b. 1967), Microsoft's third CEO. Scale AI Data labeling and evaluation infrastructure for AI. Scaling Laws The predictable relationship between compute, data and capability. Scott Forstall American software executive (b. 1969) who led iPhone software. SDS 940 The three-ton time-sharing mainframe that ran NLS from Menlo Park. Search Engine The index that made the web navigable. Sequoia Capital Founded 1972; backed Apple, Cisco and Google. Sergey Brin American entrepreneur (b. 1973), co-founder of Google. Serverless Running code without managing machines. Seymour Papert South African mathematician (1928–2016), creator of Logo and constructionism. Shane Legg New Zealand researcher (b. 1973), co-founder of DeepMind. Shel Kaphan American programmer (b. 1953), Amazon's first employee and architect. Shigeru Miyamoto Japanese designer (b. 1952), creator of Mario and Zelda. Shockley Semiconductor The 1956 company whose defectors founded Silicon Valley. Silicon Graphics Workstation maker that brought 3D graphics to film and science. Similitude The engineering science of scale: what else changes when every dimension of a thing changes. SK Hynix Korean memory maker, key supplier of HBM for AI. Sketchpad & the Light Pen Sutherland's 1963 program, the ancestor of all interactive graphics. Smalltalk The language and environment that defined OOP and the GUI. Smartphone A pocket computer that also makes calls. SMS Text messaging, an afterthought that changed communication. SoftBank Vision Fund The largest technology fund ever raised. Sophie Wilson & Steve Furber British engineers who designed the ARM processor, now in nearly every phone. SpaceX Launch company that made rockets reusable. Speech Recognition Turning sound into text. Sperry / UNIVAC Maker of the first commercial computer line. Spreadsheet (VisiCalc) The killer app that sold the personal computer. SQL The query language that outlived every rival. SRI (Stanford Research Institute) An independent research institute founded in 1946, originally affiliated with Stanford. SSD Solid-state storage that removed the last moving part. SSL / TLS The padlock that made online commerce possible. Stability AI Company behind Stable Diffusion. Stanford University American university at the center of Silicon Valley's founding. Steve Ballmer American executive (b. 1956), Microsoft's second CEO. Steve Jobs American entrepreneur (1955–2011), co-founder of Apple. Steve Wozniak American engineer (b. 1950) who designed the Apple I and II. Steven Levy American technology journalist (b. 1951), author of Hackers. Stewart Brand American writer and editor (b. 1938) of the Whole Earth Catalog. Stored Program Computer A machine that holds its instructions in the same memory as its data. Stripe Payments infrastructure for the internet economy. Stuart Russell British computer scientist (b. 1962), author of the standard AI textbook. Sun Microsystems Workstation and Java company founded in 1982. Sundar Pichai Indian-American executive (b. 1972), CEO of Google and Alphabet. Susan Kare American designer (b. 1954) who drew the Macintosh's icons and typefaces. Susan Wojcicki American executive (1968–2024), YouTube's CEO and Google's first landlord. Symbolic AI Reasoning over explicit symbols and rules. Symbolic Logic Formal notation for reasoning, the ancestor of programming languages. Symbolics Lisp machine maker whose collapse marked the first AI winter.

T

TCP/IP The protocols that let any network talk to any other. Ted Hoff American engineer (b. 1937), architect of the first microprocessor. Ted Nelson American thinker (b. 1937) who coined “hypertext” and “hypermedia.” Terry Winograd American computer scientist (b. 1946), of SHRDLU and, later, Larry Page's advisor. Tesla Electric vehicle maker and unlikely AI hardware company. Texas Instruments Home of the first integrated circuit. Theranos What happens when a story outruns the science. Tim Berners-Lee British computer scientist (b. 1955) who invented the World Wide Web. Time-Sharing Many people on one machine at once — the precondition for interactive computing. Tokenization How text becomes the units a model actually sees. Tom Perkins American investor (1932–2016), co-founder of Kleiner Perkins. Tony Fadell American engineer (b. 1969), a father of the iPod and founder of Nest. Tony Hoare British computer scientist (b. 1934), inventor of quicksort and the null reference. Touchscreen Direct manipulation without an intermediary device. TPU & AI Accelerators Silicon designed specifically for neural network math. Transformers The 2017 architecture underlying modern AI. Transistor The 1947 invention that replaced the tube and shrank the world. Travis Kalanick American entrepreneur (b. 1976), co-founder of Uber. TSMC Taiwanese foundry that manufactures most advanced chips. Turing Machine The abstract machine that defines computation itself. Twitter / X The public square that reshaped news and politics.

U

Uber Ride-hailing company that defined the gig economy. UC Berkeley American university behind BSD, RISC and much of open systems. Université de Montréal Canadian university, home of Bengio's MILA. University of Cambridge English university, home of EDSAC and of Turing's college. University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign American university whose NCSA produced Mosaic. University of Manchester English university that ran the first stored-program computer. University of Oxford English university, a center of modern AI safety and theory. University of Pennsylvania American university where ENIAC was built. University of Toronto Canadian university where deep learning was kept alive. University of Utah American university whose graphics program trained a generation. UNIX The operating system whose ideas outlived its code. URL A universal address for anything online. Urs Hölzle Swiss engineer (b. 1964) who designed Google's data centers.

V

Vacuum Tube The first electronic switch and amplifier. Van Jacobson American engineer (b. 1950) whose congestion-control fixes saved the early internet. Vannevar Bush American engineer (1890–1974) who led U.S. wartime research and imagined the Memex. Version Control & Git Tracking every change, and making collaboration possible. Vinod Khosla Indian-American investor (b. 1955), Sun co-founder turned venture capitalist. Vint Cerf American computer scientist (b. 1943), co-designer of TCP/IP. Virtual Machine A computer simulated inside another computer. Virtual Memory The illusion of more memory than you have. VMware Founded 1998; virtualization that made the cloud possible. Voice Interfaces Speech as input, from Siri onward. Von Neumann Architecture The canonical design of processor, memory and bus.

W

Walter Brattain American physicist (1902–1987), co-inventor of the point-contact transistor. Web Indexing Crawling and organizing the web at scale. WebVan & the Dot-Com Bust The right idea, the wrong decade, and $1.2bn of capital. Werner Vogels Dutch computer scientist (b. 1958), Amazon's CTO. Whitfield Diffie American cryptographer (b. 1944), co-inventor of public-key cryptography. Wi-Fi Untethered local networking. Wikipedia The encyclopedia anyone can edit, founded 2001. Wilbur & Orville Wright American inventors who achieved powered flight in 1903 by reframing the problem as control rather than propulsion. William Shockley American physicist (1910–1989) whose company seeded Silicon Valley — and whose management scattered it. Windows The operating system of the PC era. Windows (the interface idea) Overlapping regions of screen, each its own context. Windows Mobile & Nokia Two incumbents that saw the iPhone coming and could not turn. Word Embeddings Representing meaning as position in vector space. Word Processing Text editing that replaced the typewriter. World Wide Web Berners-Lee's 1989 proposal, now the default medium. WYSIWYG The screen showing what the page will be.

X

x86 The instruction set that ran the PC era. xAI Musk's AI company, founded 2023. Xerox The copier company that invented the future and sold none of it. Xerox Alto The first computer built around a graphical interface for one person — never sold commercially. Xerox Data Systems (XDS) Scientific Data Systems, bought by Xerox in 1969 and shut in 1975 — which is why PARC handed a personal computer to a company that had just quit computing. Xerox PARC Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center, founded in 1970. Xerox Star The 8010, 1981: the Alto’s commercial descendant. A graphical interface three years before the Macintosh, at roughly thirty times the price. Xerox's Commercialization Failure Inventing the personal computer and selling none of it. Xilinx Inventor of the field-programmable gate array.

Y

Y Combinator The accelerator that industrialized seed funding. Yahoo The web's first great directory and portal. Yann LeCun French computer scientist (b. 1960), inventor of convolutional networks. Yoshua Bengio Canadian computer scientist (b. 1964), deep learning pioneer.

Z

Zilog Faggin's company, maker of the Z80.

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