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The Computing Family Tree

90 years of ideas, connected. Every breakthrough built on the ones before.

Illustration companion to Issue 10: The Whole Stack

Direct influence
Conceptual influence
Major breakthrough
Key concept
Issue 1
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Issue 10

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The Computing Family Tree A panoramic visualization showing the lineage of computing concepts from the Turing Machine in 1936 through to Agent Swarms in 2026, organized by era and colored by the comic issue that covers each topic. 1936 — The Root Issue 1 1940s-1958 — First Machines Issue 2 1950s — Languages Issue 3 1969-1980s — Software Revolution Issue 4 1989-2000s — Connected World Issue 5 1958-2012 — Machine Learning Issue 6 2017-2023 — The Transformer Age Issue 7 2024-2025 — Agents Issue 8 2025-2026 — Swarms Issue 9 Turing Machine 1936 Colossus 1943 ENIAC 1945 Z3 1941 Von Neumann Arch. 1945 Transistor 1947 Integrated Circuit 1958 Assembly 1950s FORTRAN 1957 COBOL 1959 LISP 1958 Compiler 1952 Unix 1969 C Language 1972 Personal Computer 1977 Free Software 1983 World Wide Web 1989 Linux 1991 Open Source 1998 Git 2005 Google 1998 Perceptron 1958 Neural Networks 1986 ImageNet 2009 AlexNet 2012 Deep Learning 2012+ Transformer 2017 GPT 2018 BERT 2018 Claude 2023 LLMs 2020s Tool Use 2024 ReAct Pattern 2024 Claude Code 2025 Multi-Agent Systems 2025 Constellation 2025 Agent Swarms 2026 The Unix Echo Same idea, 56 years later Abstraction is the superpower
The Unix Echo
In 1969, Doug McIlroy and the Unix team had a radical idea: build small, focused tools and pipe them together. In 2025, AI agent swarms follow the exact same pattern: specialist agents, coordinated through shared protocols.
The same idea, 56 years later. Doug McIlroy would be proud.

Every breakthrough built on the ones before. That is the story of computing.

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From Turing to LLMs and Beyond · Illustration Companion