Do you know what the infrastructure of the future is? It’s not roads or rockets, it’s information. Everything from medicine to city planning to education will be based on data, which means we’ll become increasingly reliant on computers to make sense of it all — as if computers weren’t prevalent enough. But just because they’re so ubiquitous, doesn’t mean they’re less amazing. We use them on a daily basis, either to keep in touch with friends, work on amazing projects or have fun. Yet, we have to understand that like all technological achievements, for instance, space flight, the culmination we see today is the result of a long scientific journey which began a long time ago.

In the case of computer science, you can say that this started when Calculus was invented, but that would be stretching it too far. The dots really started to connect around the 18th century when the first mentions of “digital” were made and the first tentative algorithms were published. The rest is binary history, and this beautiful infographic has the gist.

Infographic source: Computer Science Zone.