MK ATLAS· Science Atlas

What Does a Computer Know?

A series for people who have never looked inside a computer. How does a heap of switches that knows only on and off come to seem to write, draw and understand speech? From a single switch to AI and the data centre, and finally to the quantum computer that breaks the switch's own rule. Not one line of code appears.

Walk this route on the map →

Leg 1 · A Computer Knows Nothing At All

  1. 11947Bardeen, Brattain, Shockley · The transistor

Leg 2 · Why 0 and 1, of All Things?

  1. 21854George Boole · Boolean algebra

Leg 3 · How to Speak to a Machine

  1. 31843Ada Lovelace
  2. 41969Margaret Hamilton · Apollo flight software

Leg 4 · How the Calculator Became a Computer

  1. 51936Alan Turing
  2. 61945von Neumann

Leg 5 · What Happens in One Click

  1. 71948Claude Shannon

Leg 6 · Why the Drawing Chip Became the Brain

  1. 82007CUDA · Repurposing the graphics chip

Leg 7 · How Does an AI Learn?

  1. 92012Hinton's group · Deep learning

Leg 8 · The Cloud Is Actually a Building

  1. 101969ARPANET / The start of the internet

Leg 9 · From Sand to Switch — The Semiconductor

  1. 111958Jack Kilby / The integrated circuit

Leg 10 · Where Memory Lives — DRAM and HBM

  1. 121966Robert Dennard / DRAM

Leg 11 · The Quantum Computer — A Switch That Is Neither On Nor Off

  1. 131948Richard Feynman · Sum over paths
  2. 141994Peter Shor / The quantum algorithm
  3. 151964John Bell · The inequality

Updated 2026-09-12