Debugging the past.
Documenting the future.
isHistory is a curated digital archive dedicated to preserving the artifacts, rare codebases, obscure architectures, and human stories that shaped our technological landscape — from the earliest computing machines to the AI systems of today.
Minds & Machines
The Story of AI
An immersive 75-article deep-dive into the full history of Artificial Intelligence — from the ancient myths of mechanical life to the large language models reshaping the world today. Written for a general audience with no technical background, each article is approximately 8,000 words of narrative, immersive, story-driven history.
Explore the Archive
Recent Artifacts
The Ancient Dream of Artificial Life
From bronze giants to clockwork wonders — before computers, the dream of artificial life lived in the human imagination for thousands of years.
NEWThe First AI Winter: When the Dream Crashed
Funding collapsed, groups dissolved, careers redirected. The full narrative of AI's first great crisis, told through the people who watched the dream crash.
Expert Systems: AI Learns to Be a Specialist
How expert systems made AI commercially viable — from DENDRAL and MYCIN to XCON, and what the approach revealed about the nature of expertise itself.
Japan's Billion-Dollar Bet on AI
Japan's Fifth Generation Computer Project alarmed the world, spent a decade at ICOT, and quietly failed. The most audacious national AI programme in history.
The Second AI Winter: Lightning Strikes Twice
AI's second great contraction — the fall of expert systems, LISP machines, and DARPA funding, and the neural network underground that kept the faith.
The Godfathers Go Underground
Hinton, LeCun, and Bengio during the years neural networks were marginalised — the decades of intellectual courage that kept the research programme alive.