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.
Curatorial Insights
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CHM Live, Curatorial Insights, Software History Center
QuickTime and the Rise of Multimedia
Friday, March 30, 2018
QuickTime, the pioneering mass-market digital video format for personal computers, was developed by Apple and released in 1991 on the Macintosh. As part of the MPEG-4 video standard, QuickTime technology can be found in every device today that plays digital video, from cell phones to 4K streaming TVs.
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Curatorial Insights
Bringing A New Voice to Genius—MITalk, the CallText 5010, and Stephen Hawking’s Wheelchair
Monday, March 26, 2018
Stephen Hawking suffered from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease. The disease would eventually paralyze him, and a bout of pneumonia in the mid-1980s made him unable to speak on his own. For such a public figure, this was a significant difficulty, one that led Hawking to a long-las
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Curatorial Insights, From the Collection
In the Holiday Spirit: Festive Music by Computer!
Thursday, December 21, 2017
Before computer gaming, music, and art became mainstay applications and tools for creation, engineers often created programs to demonstrate a machine’s capabilities in ways that were easy for the public follow. It took many years to get musicians into the idea of composing using a computer, and even longer to get gener
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Curatorial Insights, Internet History Program
Born in a Van: Happy 40th Birthday to the Internet!
Wednesday, November 22, 2017
Over the shortening fall days of 1977, an unmarked silver step van filled with futuristic equipment, shaggy-haired engineers, and sometimes fully uniformed generals quietly cruised the streets of the San Francisco Peninsula. Only an oddly shaped antenna gave a hint of its purpose.
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Curatorial Insights, Software History Center
Someone Else’s Computer: The Prehistory of Cloud Computing
Thursday, November 9, 2017
“There is no cloud,” goes the quip. “It’s just someone else’s computer.”The joke gets at a key feature of cloud computing: Your data and the software to process it reside in a remote data center — perhaps owned by Amazon, Google, or Microsoft — which you share with many users even if it feels like it’s yours alone.
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Curatorial Insights
Fairchild Semiconductor: The 60th Anniversary of a Silicon Valley Legend
Tuesday, September 19, 2017
President Eisenhower’s Civil Rights Act, Dr. Seuss’ The Cat in the Hat, and the launch of Sputnik by the Soviet Union were respectively important social, cultural, and technical news stories of 1957. There is one event that year did not make headlines but over the next 60 years also profoundly impacted all three aspect
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Curatorial Insights
Early Frontiers for Computer Creativity: TX-0 Writes a Western
Wednesday, August 23, 2017
In April 2016, filmmaker Oscar Sharp and NYU artificial intelligence researcher Ross Goodwin teamed up to create the short film Sunspring. Goodwin created an AI bot called Benjamin to write the script, and Sharp filmed it as a part of the SCI-FI-LONDON 48 Hour Film Challenge. It was impressive, but it wasn’t exactly so
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Curatorial Insights
Rediscovering “Mockingbird—A Composer’s Amanuensis”
Thursday, July 27, 2017
One day, while I was going through the videos in our archive at the Computer History Museum, I came across an interesting title: Mockingbird—A Composer’s Amanuensis. I instantly realized this was the video that I’d been waiting for ever since I started exploring computer music.
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Curatorial Insights, Exponential Center
Happy 10th Birthday, iPhone!
Thursday, June 29, 2017
By 2006 it was already clear to most people in the computing industry that the future was mobile. The cell phone was on its way to becoming the most common electronic device on earth, with over 2.7 billion users. Yet it was almost equally clear that the main events wouldn’t happen in Silicon Valley, or even the United
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Curatorial Insights
Computers & The Oscars—Best Animated Short Film
Monday, January 23, 2017
Outside of my life as a curator, I work with several film festivals as a film programmer. I am heavily invested in the Oscars every year, and most deeply involved with the Oscar for Best Animated Short Film. Having seen every Oscar nominee in the category since 1980, and nearly two-thirds of all the rest, I can say tha