“Yes, we buy cattle with M-Pesa on our mobile phones. It is far more secure than carrying cash.”George is sitting on a folding stool and wearing his tribe’s full traditional dress, a mix of loosely wrapped bright red and purple and pink plaids – as well as fluorescent beaded jewelry – that can make the Day-Glo acid col
The year 2012 marks another step in a familiar quadrennial cycle. A cycle culminating in an event that demands global attention and that has people in awe of the amount of effort and money spent to ensure that the competitors reach their peak with meticulous timing. I am not talking about the 2012 Summer Olympic Games
If you have ever played games on a computer or a console system, you have probably played at least one Blizzard game. In fact, at least 10 million people were subscribed to World of Warcraft as of October 4th, 2012. Blizzard continually produces some of the best selling and most critically acclaimed games in the indust
Every city has one: a house that scares all the local kids. Sometimes, these houses have long, dark histories that seem to have been created by horror authors in the distant, misty past. Other times, it’s merely their long-standing dereliction that lets the mind wonder what sort of evil dwells within. These creaky, cre
In the course of my work managing CHM’s collections, I often hear people use the terms preservation, conservation, and restoration synonymously. In everyday use, that’s fine. However, these terms actually mean something quite different inside the walls of a museum.
From the Collection
Before moving up a couple of exits on Highway 101N, to our current location at 1401 North Shoreline Blvd., CHM and part of its collection were housed in a WWII-era Quonset hut at Moffett Field.
As a curator at the Computer History Museum, I work at the intersection of computing technology, history, and the museum world. I am a member of different tribes with different cultures, practices, and approaches. This is easy to forget when the daily work in collections and exhibitions takes precedence. The annual con
The collection, preservation and presentation of software artifacts at CHM has been actively pursued during my time as the software curator here, though most of the work has been going on behind the scenes. Since we now have a nice venue for talking about this work with the @CHM blog, I wanted to share with you some of
Thousands of programming languages were invented in the first 50 years of the age of computing. Many of them were similar, and many followed a traditional, evolutionary path from their predecessors. What eventually became APL was first a mathematical notation, not as a computer programming language.