Long-form history for curious people
The stories behind
the technologies
that changed everything.
Deep dives into artificial intelligence, the internet, and robotics — told as they deserve to be told.
The Philosophers Who Asked 'Can Machines Think?'
Before the engineers came the philosophers. Leibniz dreamed of a calculus of thought. Pascal built the first mechanical calculator. Descartes asked whether mechanism had limits. The thinkers who laid the conceptual groundwork for everything that followed — and the questions they left unanswered that we are still wrestling with today.
From ancient myths to neural networks — the complete intellectual history of artificial intelligence.
From ARPANET to the world wide web — how a military experiment became the most transformative network in history.
From clockwork knights to Boston Dynamics — humanity's long quest to build machines that move and think.
The Logic Theorist, 1956: The First AI Program
On a winter night in 1955, a program running on a primitive computer proved a mathematical theorem for the first time in history. Its creators believed they had cracked the secret of human intelligence. They were wrong about that — but right about something more important. The full story of the Logic Theorist: the first AI program ever built.
The Turing Test, 1950: The Question That Still Has No Answer
In October 1950, a mathematician published a thirty-page paper in a philosophy journal that asked a deceptively simple question: can machines think? The paper proposed a test. The test sparked a debate. The debate has never ended. This is the story of the most important thought experiment in the history of AI.
Clockwork Wonders: The Automata Era
Before computers, before electricity, before Ada Lovelace wrote the first program — craftsmen across Europe built mechanical marvels that walked, wrote, played music, and digested food. The extraordinary story of the automata era and the question it forced the world to ask.
Alan Turing: The Man Who Invented the Future
He broke the Nazi's unbreakable code, designed the architecture of the modern computer, asked whether machines could think, and was then chemically castrated by the government he had saved. The full, extraordinary, heartbreaking life of Alan Turing.
The Dartmouth Conference, 1956: The Summer AI Was Born
In the summer of 1956, ten men gathered at a small New Hampshire college and gave a name to the dream of thinking machines. They were wildly overconfident, occasionally wrong, and completely right about the one thing that mattered most. This is the story of the week Artificial Intelligence was born.
Ada Lovelace: The First Programmer the World Forgot
She wrote the world's first computer program in 1843 — for a machine that didn't exist yet. Then history forgot her for a hundred years. The extraordinary life of Ada Lovelace, the woman who saw the future before anyone else.
"History is not the past. It is the story of how we became who we are — and the only guide we have to where we are going."
ishistory publishes long-form history for people who want to understand the technologies shaping their world. No summaries. No hot takes. Just the full story, told properly.
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