Sixty years ago, on February 14, 1956, two remarkable people addressed a luncheon for scientists, educators and the press at San Francisco’s Hotel St. Francis. One of the speakers would become one of the most successful businessmen and respected philanthropists of his generation. The other would go on to win a Nobel Pr
The Storage Engine: A Timeline of Milestones in Storage Technology, a new online exhibit at the Computer History Museum, tells the stories of some of the key people, processes, products, and organizations that have contributed to advances in computer data storage.
Curatorial Insight
People wear the technology of their time. The stone-working techniques that made weapons also shaped beads for the body. When weaving was new, the intertwined warp and woof that made water-tight baskets also formed clothes. Smelting produced daggers and bracelets alike. Some technologies started off wearable – Galileo’
The 1980s: a decade when robots were as vogue as Madonna. They graced the covers of popular magazines and strutted their stuff across the silver screen. Having grown up in the ’80s, it’s no wonder why the Computer History Museum’s stellar collection of robots is my favorite.
No area of computing holds more interest to me personally than computer music. While many see the changes computers brought to production and performance as the more impressive innovations, computers as composers offers incredible possibilities that are only now beginning to come to light.
This past 10 May 2014 marked 40 years since Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn published a paper hammering out the rudiments of the standard that would become known as “the” Internet: TCP, or Transport Control Protocol, later expanded to TCP/IP. The two ARPAnet alums had done the main work in a frenzied two-day burst while holed u
Curatorial Insight, From the Collection
In the closing pages of his epic 2007 biography “Einstein: His Life and Universe,” author Walter Isaacson observed that Albert Einstein not only was a scientist who sought a unified theory that could explain the cosmos. Einstein also was a humanist who believed that freedom was the lifeblood of creativity.
By 1987, the PC revolution was well entrenched and underway. Desktop PCs were standard hardware for home enthusiasts, businesses, government agencies, and computer labs tucked away in college campuses. However, some prognosticators were also fast at work forecasting the future of a new generation of computing devices –
