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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From the Collection, Guest Blog
Xerox Alto Source Code
Tuesday, October 21, 2014
Depending on your age, your first computer might have been an Apple II, a Radio Shack TRS-80, an IBM PC, an Apple Macintosh, or another of the early personal computers. If you missed these early machines the first time around, perhaps you have seen them in the Personal Computer section of the Revolution exhibit at the
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From the Collection
Early Digital Research CP/M Source Code
Wednesday, October 1, 2014
By the time personal computers based on microprocessors began to emerge in the mid-1970s, programmers had been writing operating systems for about twenty years. Big mainframe computers had operating systems that were huge and complicated, created from hundreds of thousands of lines of code. But other operating systems,
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Museum News
Computer History Museum: Celebrating 35 Years!
Wednesday, September 24, 2014
It seems appropriate, every so often, for a history museum to think about its own history. On September 24, 2014, we celebrate the 35th anniversary of our “grandfather”: the Digital Computer Museum that began in Marlboro Massachusetts in 1979.
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Remarkable People
Who Invented the IC?
Wednesday, August 20, 2014
Christie’s auction sale notice of the only known phase-shift oscillator circuit built by Nobel Prize winner Jack Kilby in private hands proclaimed him as the inventor “of the integrated circuit on a single chip.” While he played an important role in the development of the IC, Kilby’s 1958 prototype was but one of many
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From the Collection, Guest Blog, Software History Center
The Cryotron: Extremely Rare Superconducting Digital Circuits Come to CHM
Thursday, July 31, 2014
In the early 1950s, a young, enthusiastic and creative electrical engineer named Dudley Buck left the National Security Agency (NSA) for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Buck had worked on some of the first electronic digital computers at the NSA, and in Massachusetts joined the large program to develop
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Curatorial Insights
Lost and Found: Andy Warhol’s Amiga Artworks
Thursday, July 17, 2014
Scattered on floppy disks and hard drives around the world, there may be millions of works of art created on now-archaic computer systems.
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Guest Blog
Fearless Genius: The Digital Revolution in Silicon Valley, 1985–2000
Monday, July 7, 2014
For fifteen years I documented the efforts of a secretive tribe of engineers, entrepreneurs, and venture capitalists in Silicon Valley as they created technology that would change our culture, our behavior, and challenge what it means to be human.
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From the Collection, Guest Blog
The Juniper M40 Router
Monday, June 23, 2014
Early in 2014, the Computer History Museum added a Juniper M40 router to its collection. This router, initially released in 1998, was the first internet router to use custom-designed silicon to accelerate the movement of internet traffic in the largest nation-wide internet backbone networks. The M40 launched a race th
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Remarkable People
The 2014 Computer History Museum Fellows
Wednesday, June 11, 2014
Remarkable People
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Curatorial Insights
Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?
Saturday, May 24, 2014
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.