On January 9th and 10th of 1986, at Rickey’s Hyatt House in Palo Alto, California, there was an historic gathering of the pioneers who invented personal computing. The event was sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and hosted by the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). Called the “ACM Conferen
This is the second of five video releases of Boston Computer Society (BCS) General Meetings, by the Computer History Museum.
From the Collection
This is the first of five video releases of The Boston Computer Society (BCS) General Meetings, by the Computer History Museum.
By the mid-1980s, mass-produced personal computers had finally become powerful enough to be used for graphics. Apple had released their drawing program MacPaint [5] with the first Macintosh in 1984. But at $2500 the Mac was expensive, and it only displayed black and white images.
Curatorial Insight, From the Collection
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 –
Depending on your age, your first computer might have been an Apple II, a Radio Shack TRS-80, an IBM PC, an Apple Macintosh, or another of the early personal computers. If you missed these early machines the first time around, perhaps you have seen them in the Personal Computer section of the Revolution exhibit at the
By the time personal computers based on microprocessors began to emerge in the mid-1970s, programmers had been writing operating systems for about twenty years. Big mainframe computers had operating systems that were huge and complicated, created from hundreds of thousands of lines of code. But other operating systems,
In the early 1950s, a young, enthusiastic and creative electrical engineer named Dudley Buck left the National Security Agency (NSA) for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Buck had worked on some of the first electronic digital computers at the NSA, and in Massachusetts joined the large program to develop
