CHM Blog
The CHM blog showcases ideas and insights from our vibrant community in Silicon Valley and around the world. We take you behind the scenes of our programming, collections, and exhibits. Connecting the past to the present and into the future, we decode technology for everyone.
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Remarkable People
Moore’s Law@50: “The most important graph in human history”
Wednesday, April 15, 2015
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.
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Curatorial Insights, Internet History Program
What Do Anniversaries Mean? Internet Protocols at 40
Friday, April 10, 2015
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
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Curatorial Insights, From the Collection
The World’s Smallest Computer
Thursday, March 26, 2015
Curatorial Insight, From the Collection
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Behind the Scenes
The Two-Napkin Protocol
Wednesday, March 4, 2015
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
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Guest Blog
About the Computer History Museum’s IBM 1401 Machines
Thursday, February 19, 2015
We’ve all heard it: “Today, your phone has a zillion times more processing power than giant computers that filled an entire room in days past!” Rather than review bits and bytes, let’s look at CHM’s 1401 computer from the point of view of what it can do, and its long-lasting impact on the development of business comput
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Curatorial Insights
Insight into “The Innovators”
Wednesday, February 4, 2015
In the closing pages of his epic 2007 biography “Einstein: His Life and Universe,” author Walter Isaacson observed that Albert Einstein not only was a scientist who sought a unified theory that could explain the cosmos. Einstein also was a humanist who believed that freedom was the lifeblood of creativity.
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Remarkable People
“Who named Silicon Valley?”
Wednesday, January 7, 2015
January 11, 2015 marks the 44th anniversary of the first known appearance in print of the name “Silicon Valley.”
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Curatorial Insights, From the Collection
Yesterday’s Tomorrows: The Origins of The Tablet
Wednesday, December 17, 2014
By 1987, the PC revolution was well entrenched and underway. Desktop PCs were standard hardware for home enthusiasts, businesses, government agencies, and computer labs tucked away in college campuses. However, some prognosticators were also fast at work forecasting the future of a new generation of computing devices –
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Behind the Scenes
Road Trip: CHM Enigma Machine Goes to Hollywood
Tuesday, December 2, 2014
My Mission: TIME Magazine calls, they want our Enigma machine for a photo shoot in Hollywood featuring The Imitation Game star Benedict Cumberbatch. The movie is based on Andrew Hodges’ book, Alan Turing: The Enigma.
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Curatorial Insights
It’s About Time: The Computer on Your Wrist
Wednesday, November 12, 2014
Ubiquitous, wearable computers have been a dream since at least the 1930s. The recent announcement of the AppleWatch has renewed interest in computerized wristwatches and revived the idea of a wrist-worn computer that is cool.