It seems appropriate, every so often, for a history museum to think about its own history. On September 24, 2014, we celebrate the 35th anniversary of our “grandfather”: the Digital Computer Museum that began in Marlboro Massachusetts in 1979.
Christie’s auction sale notice of the only known phase-shift oscillator circuit built by Nobel Prize winner Jack Kilby in private hands proclaimed him as the inventor “of the integrated circuit on a single chip.” While he played an important role in the development of the IC, Kilby’s 1958 prototype was but one of many
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
Scattered on floppy disks and hard drives around the world, there may be millions of works of art created on now-archaic computer systems.
For fifteen years I documented the efforts of a secretive tribe of engineers, entrepreneurs, and venture capitalists in Silicon Valley as they created technology that would change our culture, our behavior, and challenge what it means to be human.
Early in 2014, the Computer History Museum added a Juniper M40 router to its collection. This router, initially released in 1998, was the first internet router to use custom-designed silicon to accelerate the movement of internet traffic in the largest nation-wide internet backbone networks. The M40 launched a race th
Remarkable People
At Westwood Elementary in Santa Clara, California, in room 17, there was an Apple II computer, and at recess, if you’d earned enough classroom points, you could play one of a dozen or so games. They were the standards found in every classroom in 1983.
When Robert Whitehead invented the self-propelled torpedo in the 1860s, the early guidance system for maintaining depth was so new and essential he called it “The Secret.” Airplanes got autopilots just a decade after the Wright brothers. These days, your breakfast cereal was probably gathered by a driverless harvester.
From the Collection
