Every once in awhile, I like to go into the Museum’s permanent exhibition Revolution: The First 2000 Years of Computing. I particularly look for visitors in one of the galleries I curated, Analog Computers. Oftentimes, I find someone reading a label or looking at the objects with a mix of curiosity and bewilderment.
Many consider novelist Arthur C. Clarke’s 1953 story The Nine Billion Names for God to be one of the finest stories in the history of science fiction. Computers had started to penetrate popular culture and were being used in an impressive array of new applications. Nonetheless, many might have found it a stretch to wri
40 years ago on May 23rd, 1973, a young researcher named Bob Metcalfe outlined his new “Ethernet” concept in a memo to his managers at Xerox PARC. Radio and hardware wizard Dave Boggs turned it into a working reality, the network that would connect Alto computers to each other, and to laser printers, and remote servers
Remarkable People
The Elbrus series of machines was designed at the Institute of Precision Mechanics and Computer Technology (ITMVT) in Moscow, a prestigious institute under the Soviet Academy of Sciences.
Perhaps the single most iconic character in the history of computer graphics isn’t a representation of a living thing. It’s a desk lamp.
Bob Taylor planned to be a Methodist minister, like his father. He ended up an evangelist for an idea that changed the world: easy-to-use computers that talk to each other. “I was never interested in the computer as a mathematical device, but as a communication device,” Taylor said.
In 2013, the Computer History Museum honored Ed Catmull as a CHM Fellow. Fellows are unique individuals who have made a major difference to computing and to the world around them.
What do a lame fox, loose disk drive reels and J.M. Jacquard’s dirty face have in common?
From the Collection, Remarkable People
