Over the shortening fall days of 1977, an unmarked silver step van filled with futuristic equipment, shaggy-haired engineers, and sometimes fully uniformed generals quietly cruised the streets of the San Francisco Peninsula. Only an oddly shaped antenna gave a hint of its purpose.
Perhaps the most common sector of AI today are personal chatbots, such as Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri, commercially available to the masses. Google’s iteration of this is the Google Assistant, a personal virtual assistant that works across all your devices, including your phone, watch, laptop, and TV.
“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.
Before the iPhone landed like a meteorite in 2007, it wasn’t clear that a revolution in mobile phones was coming or even necessary, says Benedict Evans, partner at Andreessen Horowitz. Back in 2006, it seemed that the devices, like cars and cameras, were making slow and steady progress with incremental improvements in
In an age of sophisticated healthcare technologies and research tools, the doctors you see or hospitals you visit are only a small part of what determines your health. Through extensive research and data analysis, one doctor discovered a tie between your zip code and your health.
Editor’s note: Curator Chris Garcia delved into the Museum’s institutional archive and uncovered a rare 1995 interview with computer art pioneer Harold Cohen, taken during The Computer Museum’s exhibition “The Robotic Artist: AARON in Living Color” (April 1−May 9, 1995). The selection below appeared in TCM’s annual rep
It’s been roughly 30 years since the desktop computer revolutionized the way the graphic design industry works. For decades before that, it was the hands of industrious workers and various ingenious machines and tools that brought type and image together on meticulously prepared paste-up boards, before they were sent t
The Computer History Museum (CHM) has a unique opportunity when it comes to teaching students about computers and the technology-driven world in which we live. As a history museum, we look at the stories and people behind the technology, contextualizing and enlivening it to make it relatable for visitors. And through o
President Eisenhower’s Civil Rights Act, Dr. Seuss’ The Cat in the Hat, and the launch of Sputnik by the Soviet Union were respectively important social, cultural, and technical news stories of 1957. There is one event that year did not make headlines but over the next 60 years also profoundly impacted all three aspect
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
