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
Silicon Valley seemed to capture lightning in a bottle overnight. Home to the computing revolution that spawned a culture of risk taking and technological innovation, Silicon Valley is an ethos that extends to frontiers across the globe. From one to one billion, the Valley is founded upon the belief that one idea can c
Editor’s Note: Interspersed throughout this blog are quotes from Clara’s fellow Exponential Center interns, as they too reflect on their summer at the Computer History Museum (CHM).People often ask me why I chose to intern at a computer museum when I am not planning to major in computer science nor museum operations. G
Before MRI, the inner workings of the human body were a mystery, glimpsed only through dissection or experimentation. Today, this technology doesn’t just allow doctors to better understand anatomy—it is also reducing costs, eliminating unnecessary procedures, and most importantly, saving lives.
In April 2016, filmmaker Oscar Sharp and NYU artificial intelligence researcher Ross Goodwin teamed up to create the short film Sunspring. Goodwin created an AI bot called Benjamin to write the script, and Sharp filmed it as a part of the SCI-FI-LONDON 48 Hour Film Challenge. It was impressive, but it wasn’t exactly so
“Some people say, ‘Oh, I have the Monday morning problems’ or the ‘Sunday afternoon blues’ because you have to go to work, but I never have that. I really go to work fully aware of what we are doing and fully aware of the necessity of what we are doing,” said Dr. Jean Claude Zenklusen, director of The Cancer Genome Atl
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
It took two and a half years, two full-time archivists, and nine part-time volunteers, but the Computer History Museum is thrilled to announce the completion of its Archives Processing Project (CHM APP).
