CHM Blog
The CHM blog showcases ideas and insights from our vibrant community in Silicon Valley and around the world. We take you behind the scenes of our programming, collections, and exhibits. Connecting the past to the present and into the future, we decode technology for everyone.
Behind the Scenes
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Behind the Scenes
CHM and Seagate: Preserving Digital History
Wednesday, May 20, 2026
Seagate Technology's donation of a petabyte of storage is a gamechanger for CHM's preservation activities.
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Behind the Scenes
Apple Lisa: Still More to Uncover
Tuesday, January 24, 2023
CHM's Al Kossow shares his personal story about recovering the Apple Lisa source code.
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Behind the Scenes
Mission Impossible: CHM Edition
Tuesday, March 29, 2022
Follow a dedicated team of museum professionals and others as they race to preserve an important collection in record time.
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Behind the Scenes, Museum News
Thriving in Place: CHM’s Journey through the Early Days of the COVID-19 Pandemic
Tuesday, July 14, 2020
Looking back, the entire effort was a balance of teamwork, community support, new tools at the right time, and, most importantly, digging deep to find a new level of stamina and creativity.
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Behind the Scenes
The Future: Humans and AI
Wednesday, April 22, 2020
Pamela McCorduck may be one of the few people qualified to make a prediction about where the development of artificial intelligence will lead. But, as a true humanist, she avoids an invitation to hubris. Instead, in the excerpt below from the end of her 2019 book, "This Could Be Important: My Life and Times with the Ar
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Behind the Scenes
Panic and Privilege
Thursday, April 9, 2020
Author Pamela McCorduck relates how she's seen science and the humanities converge in the field of artificial intelligence.
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Behind the Scenes
The Promise of the Doctor Program: Early AI At Stanford
Wednesday, March 25, 2020
McCorduck describes how the early Doctor program illustrates many issues that still surround artificial intelligence. There’s the dream of harnessing AI for a better future, concerns about ethics at the intersection of AI and human behavior, and the clash of personalities and perspectives in a new field with both unpre
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Behind the Scenes
AI Is Already Here, For Good Or Bad
Wednesday, March 11, 2020
It will ask questions we don’t even know how to ask. It will think the things we are incapable of thinking. It will experience and feel the things that we aren’t capable of.
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Behind the Scenes, Software History Center
Restoring Yesterday’s “Computer System of Tomorrow”: A Conversation with Curator & Xerox Alto Restorer Al Kossow
Tuesday, July 18, 2017
The Software History Center at the Computer History Museum is restoring two Xerox Alto computers, part of the center’s Alto System Project. Today’s computers and connected devices are direct descendants of some of Alto’s early innovations.
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Behind the Scenes, Education
Designing with People: A Collaborative Process with IDEO
Tuesday, May 2, 2017
This is the second post in an ongoing series about the making of the Computer History Museum’s Education Center.