Computer science/Catalogs/List of seminal concepts in computer science

This is a list of seminal concepts in computer science.

• subroutines (originally implemented with self-modifying code; Whirlwind had a really cool instruction to help in that)
• virtual memory - also memory management in general
• 1952: the first compiler written by Grace Hopper - also programming language, interpreter
  • Plus a bunch of language features/ideas, e.g. structures, which arrived in COBOL; different calling conventions (call-by-name, call-by-reference, call-by-value, etc)
• operating system (invention of) - also batch processing, timesharing
  • Switching processes, and support for multiple processors, by switching kernel stacks
• threading and local variable scope, requiring use of stack frames
  • stacks, in general, preceded some of the later elucidations, depending on exactly what you mean by 'threading'
• hierarchical file systems
• stored program architecture
• Von Neumann architecture (having program and data in same physical memory) (EDVAC was the first instance in a design, the Manchester University 'Baby' was the first actual operating one, and the EDSAC was the first useful machine of this type)
• Harvard Mark I: Harvard architecture (having program and data in different physical memories)
• 1950's (need exact date); Konrad Zuse was likely the first to propose pipelining of processor instructions for faster throughput (invention of); but I don't know what computer actually did it first
• all the other key processor design speedups, at least the biggest concepts (each has a multiple ways of being realized)
• compiler optimizations
• Cross compilation: allows support for new/experimental platforms, or platforms for which a native development environment is not readily available
• Bootstrapping: Getting it all going. Myriad examples include having an OS (Unix) written 99% in a high-level language (C), so that to port the OS to a different processor required mainly writing a C compiler for that processor; along with the item above, a precursor to what open source and embedded projects do when they have to compile their code for various hardware/OS platforms
• hardware abstraction: the BIOS does this in an IBM compatible PC; the measure of success for a hardware abstraction can be seen in part by the portability of the code dependent upon it - maybe a better example is the earlier IBM 360 architecture, where the same virtual machine was instantiated in a number of totally different physical implementations
• relational database model first proposed by E.F. Codd in 1969.
• the various ways (past and present) for distributing applications across a network, or making procedure calls across a network: EDI, COM, COM+, CORBA, RPC, XML-RPC, and now XML web services (so-called Service Oriented Architecture, or SOA)
  • networking in general - early networking support was, err, primitive!
• advent of managed code languages, such as Ada and Java, that can provide "type safety" and other benefits such as substantial software reuse by means of shared libraries