The open field of computing: every way to compute, and how old it is.
Von Neumann's architecture — fetch, compute, store, repeat — is one idea among dozens, and not the most efficient. Beneath it is a whole field: numbers that make the multiplier vanish, memory that computes where it sits, physics that samples for free, light that multiplies at no cost, matter that solves a problem by settling into its lowest energy. This atlas surveys them, from the orbital gigawatt datacenter down to the sub-microwatt microcontroller. The striking thing is the dates. Balanced ternary shipped in the Setun computer in 1958. The memristor was predicted in 1971. The Ising model is 1925; cellular automata, the 1940s; reversible computing, 1961. These are not moats — they are deep, published prior art, an open commons anyone can build on. Which reframes the question: the future of computing is not the discovery of one new method — every method has already been thought of and tried. It is the convergence of the open ones into a single machine that spends energy only where physics demands it.
Every node is a real method with a real history; the year is when its prior art begins. Read the map left-to-right by scale — a batteryless microcontroller running on ambient energy, out to a gigawatt solar datacenter in orbit — and top-to-bottom by paradigm. Filter by family; click any method for its principle, its energy or math advantage, and the century-deep lineage it rests on. We go deep on two of these — ternary for the deterministic path and thermodynamic for the stochastic — because their convergence is the edge stack.
In the field · the map's edges are moving fastest. At the largest scale, orbital datacenters left slideware behind — Starcloud trained a model in orbit in December 2025, and Google's Project Suncatcher aims solar-powered TPU satellites at 2027. At the smallest, energy-harvesting microcontrollers compute with no battery at all. In between, every unconventional paradigm — in-memory and memristive, neuromorphic, photonic, thermodynamic — is closing on practicality at once. The Institute's position is the plain one the dates imply: none of this is anyone's private future. It is an open commons, and the work is to converge it well.
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