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
Rather than using IBM proprietary components developed for their many other computers, the IBM PC used industry standard commercial parts. That included adopting the Intel 8088 microprocessor as the heart of the computer.
The dominant word processing program for personal computers in the 1980s was DOS-based WordPerfect. Microsoft Word for DOS, which had been released in 1983, was an also-ran.
Twenty five years ago this month, Tim Berners-Lee first proposed what became the World Wide Web. Today it is living up to its ambitious name, serving three billion people with many more yet to come. To mark the anniversary, we’re telling the story of those early days in this article and in our annual issue of Core m
Late one afternoon in the fall of 1974, in the sleepy California seaside town of Pacific Grove, programmer Gary Kildall and electronic engineer John Torode “retired for the evening to take on the simpler task of emptying a jug of not-so-good red wine … and speculating on the future of our new software tool”.
The number one question I get asked about oral histories is: “When will the video be available online?” Not, will the video be available online, but when. With instant video sharing made possible by websites like YouTube and Vimeo, in addition to mobile apps like Vine, it’s no longer a question of capability, but of ti
On January 26, 2014, the Computer History Museum released this never-before-seen video of the first public showing of Macintosh. Thirty years ago, on January 30, 1984, Steve Jobs came to Boston to introduce his groundbreaking new computer to members of the world’s largest personal computer organization.
SpaceWar! the granddaddy of computer games, debuted in 1962. Since then games have evolved, both in the technology they use and in the role they play in the lives of people of all generations. New game sales surpass many other entertainment media and get press coverage to match.
