In many parts of our world today, group communication centers on visual materials built with “presentation software,” often crafted by a speaker him or herself. As a result, meetings now generally depend on the use of personal computers, presentation software in the guises of product or service and display by digital p
The 2016 Vintage Computer Festival (VCF), an amazing grass-roots showcase of historical computers, was held at the Computer History Museum recently. VCF has a rich history and is a favorite event among computer enthusiasts everywhere with new standout exhibits each year.
In the very, very, beginning, the World Wide Web was meant to be a two-way medium. You could post and edit your own pages as easily as you could browse those created by others. But the browsers that made the web popular left out editing features.
The entrepreneurial, technology-driven roots of today’s Silicon Valley sprouted long before Google’s algorithms, Apple’s two Steves, Fairchild’s chipmeisters, or the egalitarian management innovations of Hewlett and Packard. Eager emissaries from less prosperous regions of the nation and foreign governments striving to
The Computer History Museum inspires people from all over the world every day, and this summer, the Museum became a place where 18 high school students engaged with history, explored their passions, and discovered their strengths. This is part two of two of CHM’s High School Internship Program blog series, compiled and
The Computer History Museum inspires people from all over the world every day, and this summer, the Museum became a place where 18 high school students engaged with history, explored their passions, and discovered their strengths. This is part one of two of CHM’s High School Internship Program blog series, compiled and
Harold Cohen was a pioneer in computer art, in algorithmic art, and in generative art; but as he told me one afternoon in 2010, he was first and foremost a painter. He was also an engineer whose work defined the first generation of computer-generated art. His system, AARON, is one of the longest-running, continually ma
Gordon Moore and Intel. Steve Jobs and Apple. Bill Gates and Microsoft. Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook. These entrepreneurs and the iconic companies they have built rank among the most transformational stories of our time. They illustrate that one idea can create a billion devices, generate a billion dollars, or touch a
This month marks 25 years since the Web’s public announcement in several online forums and the release of the WWW code library, libWWW. The library was a kind of “roll your own” tool kit that gave volunteer programmers the pieces they needed to write their own Web browsers and servers. Their efforts—over half a dozen
Gary Kildall was a pioneer of personal computer software. He wrote programming language tools, including assemblers (Intel 4004), interpreters (BASIC), and compilers (PL/M). He created a widely-used disk operating system (CP/M). He and his wife, Dorothy McEwen, started a successful company called Digital Research to de