Private Military Companies (PMCs) are the modern day version of mercenaries, or soldiers for hire. Since the dawn of civilization, professional warriors have emerged in every race, culture, and ...

WWII hindered the progress of computer inventors like Atanasoff and Zuse but had the opposite effect on the first British steps toward the creation of electronic computers. During the war, the ...

Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider (see biography of Licklider), called also J.C.R. or “Lick”, was an American scientist, an imaginative experimenter and theoretician, who left major marks not only in ...

Many thanks to Mr. Denis Roegel, Professor at Loria, France, for his seminal work on White’s adding machine. Late in his life (the preface mentions his declining health and approaching mortality), he ...

Understanding World War 2 is important to appreciate how the modern world's current political and military order was shaped. As the most catastrophic conflict in human history, World War 2 reshaped ...

While 150,000 troops might have been part of the initial D-Day invasion on June 6, 1944, more than two million soldiers would hit the beaches in the future to push Germany back across Europe. Soldiers ...

Who was Jacques de Vaucanson? Jacques de Vaucanson (1709–1782) is a French engineer and inventor. He is responsible for creating the world’s first robots, the first automated loom, and building the ...

The word automat is the Latinization of the Greek word αὐτόματον, which means acting of one’s own will. It is more often used to describe moving machines, especially those made to resemble human or ...

A computer that processes analog data is known as an analog computer. Analog computers store information in physical quantities in a continuous format and use measurements to perform computation.

The pin-wheel mechanism, known from the sketch of Leibniz and machines of Poleni (1709) and Braun (1727) was forgotten for a long time. It was not until about 1840 when two inventors almost ...

The Polish Jew Abraham Jakub Stern (see biography of Abraham Stern), a mathematician, inventor, translator, and censor, was born in 1768 in Hrubieszów, in a poor Jewish family. Around 1800, while ...

Charles Babbage was a mathematician and polymath born in 1791, the son of a wealthy textile merchant. He studied mathematics at Cambridge and eventually became a Lucasian professor of mathematics. At ...