A timeline of the history of programming languages

Which was the first ever programming language created ? Well for your information, it is not C or Pascal but Fortran. Of course, before Fortran, there were a number of other languages such as the assembly language. But Fortran is considered the first major procedural language. In fact, Fortran was created way back in 1954. And till now I thought C was a relatively old language - silly me.

C language or rather the Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie (K&R) C which we learn today is quite new in relation to the history of programming languages and was born in the year 1978 - over 20 years after Fortran and 8 years after Pascal. Btw, did you know that the Linux kernel itself is almost entirely coded in C ?

Fig: A slice of the timeline of programming languages

I came across this awesome timeline of programming languages which tracks the most important computer languages, that gives a fascinating insight into their roots and their development roadmap. The timeline is itself the work of Éric Lévénez which I have covered on this blog some time back. This timeline is by no means complete as it just includes 50 of the more than 2500 documented programming languages but these 50 languages can be considered to be the most important of them.

World map of Internet connectivity

Care to know the level of Internet connectivity in your country ? Or rather, you would like to know which all areas in the world are the most densely wired. Well here is a pictorial representation of the density of Internet connection.

Fig: Internet connectivity world map

The aptly named "Internet Map" is the creation of Cris Harrison. To create the set of visual maps, he made use of the data from the DIMES project which is a distributed scientific research project, aimed to study the structure and topology of the Internet - a purely volunteer effort on the lines of SETI@HOME project.

Not surprisingly, Europe, USA and Japan lead in the most wired areas in the world.

View the full set of maps of the internet connectivity across the world at Cris Harrison's site.

Awesome timeline of Unix, Linux and Mac OSX

A beautifully constructed timeline of Unix which includes modern day Unix descendants such as Solaris and Mac OSX as well as Linux. This timeline is not very much unlike the mind map of Linux I had created a long time back. But this timeline also provides the year when the Unix/Linux flavor was born. [Via: Zwahlen Design blog]

Fig: Unix - Linux timeline

Introducing the Interactive Linux kernel map

Linux kernel contains well over 5 million lines of code spread over 100's of files. And it should be a real chore to keep track of specific functions in the different files.

Enter the Interactive Linux kernel map. This map is unique in the sense that all the main functions which play an important part in the functioning of various aspects of Linux kernel are listed in a pictorial format. What is more, the picture can be moved around in the page using the mouse pointer and also zoomed to various levels just by moving the mouse wheel (if your mouse has one).

Navigation using the mouse is done as follows :

• Wheel - zoOM
• Drag - Move
• Keywords, which are links which you can click and be taken to the respective pages.
  

Fig: Interactive Linux kernel map.

Let's say I want to find out more about the function sys_open(). I know that it belongs to the user space interfaces and in the storage section. Using the interactive Linux kernel map, I can easily navigate to the sys_open() link and voila! I am taken to another page which lists the name of all the files where this function can be found. Clicking on any link on this page takes one to the file and location in the file this function is used. Really cool. Even if you are not a programmer, you will find this tool really useful to troubleshoot or atleast pinpoint the problem if you have a better understanding of some of the functions used in the Linux kernel. SO without much ado, check out the Interactive Linux kernel map.

Timeline of web browsers

I came across this timeline of web browsers which is very interesting. The timeline threw up a number of surprises for me. For example, only five web browsers have ever been developed from scratch or in other words from grounds up. And surprise! one of them is not the infamous Internet Explorer. In fact, the Internet Explorer (according to the timeline) is originally based on the code base of Mosaic web browser.

The five original web browsers are Mosaic, Opera, Konqueror, Omniweb and iCab. All the rest of the brood have a percentage of the code of either Mosaic or Konqueror. So without further ado, here is the timeline of the web browsers ever developed.... (Courtesy: Wikimedia.org)

View the image

Please note: The image is an SVG format and so you will need a web browser which displays svg images (Eg: Firefox).

Related articles:
Mind map of Linux distributions
A Timeline of the History of Unix/Linux Revisited

Mind Map of Linux - Version 2

A few days back, I had posted a mind map of Linux distributions on this blog. And I received a flood of suggestions, criticisms and ideas. And guess what ? I have included (almost) all the ideas and suggestions made and have seriously taken into consideration the criticisms as well. The end result is this updated mind map of GNU/Linux with even more Linux distributions included and some color coding thrown in as well. But the challenge was in making the mind map retain its clarity even after all these changes. At the same time, I also wanted to restrict the size of the resultant image. And I think I have succeeded to a certain extent in this endeavor.

Fig: Mind Map of GNU/Linux distributions (Ver 2). Click on the image.

Suggestions and Ideas I have incorporated ...

• More Linux distributions added
• A separate section for multi-lingual Linux distributions
• Color coding included on a small scale
• Rectified some mistakes pointed out earlier.
• The map now has a pure white background. So is much more clear.
  

And those I have not included ...

• I have left out a couple of Linux distributions, especially those which are historically significant but which are not under active development like SLS, erstwhile Red Hat, Yggdrasil and so on. This is because I felt the mind map should mirror the state of current Linux distributions rather than be a historical time line of them.
• Secondly, including these will also make the map more complex and I wanted to retain the simplicity of the mind map. And excluding such historically significant but redundant distributions helped in achieving this.
  

Hopefully, I will be able to add more Linux distributions as and when I get more inputs and ideas.
The credit for this updated mind map goes to all the readers of this blog who took the time to give suggestions, ideas and point out the mistakes on the previous map. Kudos to you all :) .

Update: You may download the high resolution PNG format of the mind map file here (File size: 206 KB).

Related Reads:
A complete concise history of GNU/Linux
My indomitable thoughts on GNU, Linux, Open Source, Java and free cats and dogs