Curatorial Insight
The writer and futurist Arthur C. Clarke said, “The Information Age offers much to mankind... But it is vital to remember that information — in the sense of raw data — is not knowledge, that knowledge is not wisdom, and that wisdom is not foresight. But information is the first essential step to all of these.”
Sometimes, we can look back at fictional items from the days before the computer and see threads to machines that would exist decades, or even centuries later. When the museum opened Revolution: The First 2000 Years of Computing, a visitor pointed out that we didn’t mention what they considered to be the earliest descr
November 15th marks Guinness World Records Day, a day when Guinness challenges the world at large to break as many records as possible within a 24-hour period. In honor of Guinness’s Day, here are 10 amazing Guinness World Records related to computer history.
The year 2012 marks another step in a familiar quadrennial cycle. A cycle culminating in an event that demands global attention and that has people in awe of the amount of effort and money spent to ensure that the competitors reach their peak with meticulous timing. I am not talking about the 2012 Summer Olympic Games
Every city has one: a house that scares all the local kids. Sometimes, these houses have long, dark histories that seem to have been created by horror authors in the distant, misty past. Other times, it’s merely their long-standing dereliction that lets the mind wonder what sort of evil dwells within. These creaky, cre
Before moving up a couple of exits on Highway 101N, to our current location at 1401 North Shoreline Blvd., CHM and part of its collection were housed in a WWII-era Quonset hut at Moffett Field.
As a curator at the Computer History Museum, I work at the intersection of computing technology, history, and the museum world. I am a member of different tribes with different cultures, practices, and approaches. This is easy to forget when the daily work in collections and exhibitions takes precedence. The annual con
How much influence have television, movies, literature and art had on the sciences?
Who really invented the Internet? I was fascinated by the recent kerfuffle over this question, which started with Gordon Crovitz’s July article in the Wall Street Journal. The catch is that even if you could dispel the political agendas of the folks writing (Crovitz wanted to show that private trumps public), or erase
