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.
Software History Center
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Remarkable People, Software History Center
2018 Museum Fellow Dov Frohman-Bentchkowsky: Silicon, Science, Memory & Survival
Wednesday, April 18, 2018
For the invention of the first commercial erasable programmable read-only memory (EPROM), which enabled rapid development of microprocessor-based
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Remarkable People, Software History Center
2018 Museum Fellow Guido van Rossum, Python Creator & Benevolent Dictator for Life
Thursday, April 5, 2018
For the creation and evolution of the Python programming language and for leadership of its community.
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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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From the Collection, Software History Center
The Shocking Truth Behind Arnold Nordsieck’s Differential Analyzer
Thursday, January 18, 2018
In 1950, the physicist Arnold Nordsieck built himself this analog computer. Nordsieck, then at the University of Illinois, had earned his PhD at the University of California, Berkeley, under Robert Oppenheimer. To make his analog computer for calculating differential equations, the inventive and budget-conscious Nordsi
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CHM Live, Software History Center
Women, Gender, Sexuality, and Computing History
Thursday, January 11, 2018
The experience of women, and the issues of gender and sexuality, are vitally important to our understanding of the story of computing, and hence our contemporary world, for many reasons. Perhaps most straightforwardly, women have been ubiquitous throughout the history of computing as makers and users of it. As Eileen C
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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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From the Collection, Software History Center
Seymour Cray: The Man Who Brought Style to Supercomputers
Thursday, September 14, 2017
A supercomputer is simply a computer that can perform many more calculations per second than the typical computer of its era. The definition is in constant flux. Yesterday’s supercomputer packed the punch of today’s smartphone. From 1969 to 1975, Control Data Corp.’s CDC 7600 was considered the world’s fastest computer
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From the Collection, Software History Center
An Early Door to Cyberspace: The Community Memory Terminal
Wednesday, August 16, 2017
COMMUNITY MEMORY is the name we give to this experimental information service. It is an attempt to harness the power of the computer in the service of the community. We hope to do this by providing a sort of super bulletin board where people can post notices of all sorts and can find the notices posted by others rapidl
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Behind the Scenes, Software History Center
Restoring Yesterday’s “Computer System of Tomorrow”: A Conversation with Curator & Xerox Alto Restorer Al Kossow
Tuesday, July 18, 2017
The Software History Center at the Computer History Museum is restoring two Xerox Alto computers, part of the center’s Alto System Project. Today’s computers and connected devices are direct descendants of some of Alto’s early innovations.
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Remarkable People, Software History Center
2017 CHM Fellow Alan Cooper: Father of Visual Basic
Tuesday, April 11, 2017
2017 CHM Fellow Alan Cooper is best known as the “Father of Visual Basic,” possibly the most widely used visual programming environment in the software industry.