On Tuesday, July 16, 2013, a group of almost seventy people attended a CHM SoundByte lunchtime lecture entitled The Totalisator – An Algorithm That Led to an Industry.
Curatorial Insight
Whether you’re a Maasai tribesman buying and selling cattle on your mobile phone, or a Norwegian bride to the altar with the groom you met online, it’s hard to think of an area of modern life that’s not being radically changed by the Web, the Internet, and mobile data. It is also hard to think of a field where even the
People don’t associate legendary Pop artist Andy Warhol with the computer. While most of Warhol’s creative output happened in the 1960s, when only a few serious artists had access to and used computers, he continued to paint and create artworks up until his death in 1987. Towards the end of his life, he began to create
Curatorial Insight
Every once in awhile, I like to go into the Museum’s permanent exhibition Revolution: The First 2000 Years of Computing. I particularly look for visitors in one of the galleries I curated, Analog Computers. Oftentimes, I find someone reading a label or looking at the objects with a mix of curiosity and bewilderment.
Many consider novelist Arthur C. Clarke’s 1953 story The Nine Billion Names for God to be one of the finest stories in the history of science fiction. Computers had started to penetrate popular culture and were being used in an impressive array of new applications. Nonetheless, many might have found it a stretch to wri
40 years ago on May 23rd, 1973, a young researcher named Bob Metcalfe outlined his new “Ethernet” concept in a memo to his managers at Xerox PARC. Radio and hardware wizard Dave Boggs turned it into a working reality, the network that would connect Alto computers to each other, and to laser printers, and remote servers
Perhaps the single most iconic character in the history of computer graphics isn’t a representation of a living thing. It’s a desk lamp.
In the beginning the net was mostly non-commercial, but that began to change as it grew in leaps and bounds. Soon millions around the nation had online access, at home and at work, and the stage was set. The first money-making sites were, of course, about personals ads and about sex. But then entrepreneurs began to lau
