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.
What is software? You can’t taste it, smell it, or touch it but they say it’s everywhere and it’s changing our lives forever. Since I started working at the Computer History Museum back in 2000, I’ve heard curators, trustees, volunteers, almost everyone, talk about how we need to tell the story of software.
How much influence have television, movies, literature and art had on the sciences?
Day-to-day my job is to help develop exhibits and to make movies and media for museums. What’s the story? What are the main points? What should the visitor remember when they walk out of the exhibit? It’s not always so easy to figure out the core of what you’re trying to represent.
