New England has a distinguished history of tech conferences. Here are some

In 1981, physicists and computer scientists — and at least one dog — gathered at MIT’s Endicott House conference center for the Physics of Computation conference. Richard Feynman, already a Nobel laureate in physics, proposed that building a new kind of computer around quantum mechanics — which describes matter and energy at the atomic and subatomic levels — would be necessary to simulate natural systems such as weather or the workings of the human body.

“Nature isn’t classical, dammit,” Feynman said at the conference, “and if you want to make a simulation of nature, you’d better make it quantum mechanical.”

Forty years later, companies such as IBM, Microsoft, and Google are building quantum computers, which are thousands of times faster than conventional computers. But quantum computers are largely used for research rather than business — and lots of problems still need to be solved, as Feynman predicted.

“It was quite thrilling,” says Danny Hillis, who participated in the conference as an MIT graduate student. “The physicists there met the computation types, and a lot of the roots of quantum computing come from that.”

Hillis, who later founded the supercomputer company Thinking Machines in Kendall Square, says the event “felt like the passing of a torch,” with some older attendees who had built the first generation of computers, and others, like him, working on new designs and architecture.

What if you could take a Lego-like approach to designing new biological organisms? In June 2004, MIT professor Tom Knight suggested that having a standardized kit of parts that worked together in predictable ways could help accelerate the new field of synthetic biology, which manipulates the genetic code of living things like yeast and bacteria to get desired outputs. Knight was among the speakers at the First International Meeting on Synthetic Biology in Cambridge. That field has now successfully managed to produce synthetic replacements for ingredients that are typically grown and harvested — like artemisinin, a key component of malaria treatment usually derived from a plant.

That 2004 meeting helped lay the groundwork for startups like Ginkgo Bioworks of Boston, which has more than 1,000 employees and is publicly traded — but not yet profitable. (Knight was a cofounder of Ginkgo.)

Other business-oriented conferences have helped create momentum around industries such as digital marketing and robotics. I took a break from my August vacation in 2012 to go to HubSpot’s first Inbound conference at the Hynes Convention Center; it brought together several thousand people interested in the ways that blogs and social platforms like Facebook and Twitter were changing the way that companies attract and communicate with customers. That event happens annually, attracting about 10,000 marketers to town; the next edition is in early September. (Still summer!)

The RoboBusiness conference took place for the first time in May 2004, with more than 400 attendees. “Robot conferences did really catalyze the industry,” says Helen Greiner, a cofounder of iRobot, the Bedford company that makes the Roomba vacuum cleaner. “The field owes a lot to Dan Kara’s drive and evangelism for a business-oriented robot conference.”

Kara is an Upton-based analyst and conference organizer. He views RoboBusiness as “a critical event in the establishment of Boston as the robotics cluster worldwide.” At the time, he says, Silicon Valley “was asleep at the wheel,” and “the Pittsburgh robotics cluster had yet to develop.”

One wintertime event worth mentioning: the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, first held in 2006. It focuses on how the sports industry leverages data in assembling and managing teams — and connecting with fans. The event’s startup competition and research paper showcase have featured many young entrepreneurs and ventures that have gone on to raise money, be acquired, or go public, as in the case of the online sports-betting company DraftKings. One of that event’s founders, Jessica Gelman, now runs the Kraft Analytics Group, which consults on data management in the sports business, and is part of the Kraft…