By the mid-1980s, mass-produced personal computers had finally become powerful enough to be used for graphics. Apple had released their drawing program MacPaint [5] with the first Macintosh in 1984. But at $2500 the Mac was expensive, and it only displayed black and white images.
The rise of TTL to dominate the IC logic business established a pattern familiar to observers of the semiconductor industry with its succession of DRAM, Microprocessor, and Flash “Wars.” Battles for supremacy for their products raged for years between all major suppliers on technical features, manufacturing cost, and m
People wear the technology of their time. The stone-working techniques that made weapons also shaped beads for the body. When weaving was new, the intertwined warp and woof that made water-tight baskets also formed clothes. Smelting produced daggers and bracelets alike. Some technologies started off wearable – Galileo’
The 1980s: a decade when robots were as vogue as Madonna. They graced the covers of popular magazines and strutted their stuff across the silver screen. Having grown up in the ’80s, it’s no wonder why the Computer History Museum’s stellar collection of robots is my favorite.
Whether it’s a “Speak & Spell” educational game or an IBM mainframe computer, everyone finds something from their own lives on display at CHM — but there’s more to the museum than meets the eye. As the largest international collection of computing artifacts, the museum only displays a fraction of its over 100,000 ite
No area of computing holds more interest to me personally than computer music. While many see the changes computers brought to production and performance as the more impressive innovations, computers as composers offers incredible possibilities that are only now beginning to come to light.
Moore’s “Law” is not a law of nature or science but an observation by Gordon E. Moore, Director of the Fairchild Semiconductor Research and Development Laboratories in Palo Alto, CA in 1965 that evolved over the years and emerged as one of the most familiar maxims in techdom.
This past 10 May 2014 marked 40 years since Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn published a paper hammering out the rudiments of the standard that would become known as “the” Internet: TCP, or Transport Control Protocol, later expanded to TCP/IP. The two ARPAnet alums had done the main work in a frenzied two-day burst while holed u
Curatorial Insight, From the Collection
In 1989, Kirk Lougheed of Cisco and Yakov Rekhter of IBM were having lunch in a meeting hall cafeteria at an Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) conference. They wrote a new routing protocol that became RFC (Request for Comment) 1105, the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), known to many as the “Two Napkin Protocol” — in
