Robert W. “Bob” Bemer - who worked at Lockheed's Missile Systems Division in Van Nuys and who would become its IBM 650's power user - carefully cut out the article and placed it into a scrapbook. In 2018, through its Access to Historical Records grant from the National Archives' National Publications and Records Commis
The photograph was dated 1950, a date when a now unimaginably small number of humans had ever beheld a computer, no less touched one, and when unabashed racism and discrimination was endemic on the American scene. Who was the young African-American man who nevertheless sat at the controls of this storied machine? What
While trying to decipher the notes in Gordon’s cryptic scrawl, something familiar about the arrangement of the rectangles triggered my Madeleine Moment. This was the Rosetta Stone to the device types in that 1967 photograph and the first five appeared to match the years of the devices on the plot of Figure 2 from the 1
One of the most significant figures along the path to the development of automatic computation was a French weaver and merchant born during the reign of Louis XV—Joseph Marie Jacquard. CHM's J. M. Jacquard portrait was “adopted” by first-time donor Junfeng Pan. Thanks to his generosity, our portrait will undergo much n
Sixty-seven years to the day after the television debut of Whirlwind’s “Jingle Bells,” we offer you this restoration of the program from the original punched paper tape at CHM, recovering an overlooked early piece of the rise of computer music from the auditory maintenance of early electronic digital computers.
Although much of Whirlwind was lost when the machine was decommissioned, the Computer History Museum and the MIT Museum retain many of the machine’s components, some of which are on display in CHM’s permanent exhibition, Revolution: The First 2000 Years of Computing.
CHM's Software History Center has been conducting “video ethnographies” to record and preserve the experience of running historical software. Over the course of 2018, the center has conducted two video ethnographies surrounding a key moment at the end of the late 1980s and early 1990s, the birth of multimedia. Watch an
CHM has received a National Historical Publications and Records Commission: Access to Historical Records grant to process material related to software history. The collections in CHM’s Software History Processing Project (SHiPP) represent a deep and broad resource for understanding software’s impact on society.
Electronic mail is one of “killer apps” of networked computing. The ability to quickly send and receive messages without having to be online at the same time created a new form of human communication. By now billions of people have used email.
The Computer History Museum (CHM) recently released six video-recorded oral histories of key engineers and scientists from Japan who made seminal contributions to the magnetic recording technologies used in hard disk drives.
