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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Behind the Scenes
Catalysts for Memory: Online Access to the vast CHM Collection
Wednesday, May 13, 2015
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
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Curatorial Insights
Algorithmic Music – David Cope and EMI
Wednesday, April 29, 2015
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.
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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 –