The purpose of this article is to provide a brief history of the development and application of computer algorithms for the analysis and prediction of DNA binding sites. This problem can be conveniently divided into two subproblems. The first is, given a collection of known binding sites, develop a representation of those sites that can be used to search new sequences and reliably predict where additional binding sites occur. The second is, given a set of sequences known to contain binding sites for a common factor, but not knowing where the sites are, discover the location of the sites in each sequence and a representation for the specificity of the protein.