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.
About five years ago, I noticed a box of punched cards that had set aside. It had been sent by high-performance computing researcher Lloyd Fosdick to the Museum’s forerunner, The Computer Museum, in 1985 and somehow made the trip from Boston to California when the collection was transferred.
RIP Hans Camenzind, Wizard of Analog extraordinaire.
From the Collection
The Computer History Museum had its own mini deluge of historical digital data. Our oral histories, lectures, and exhibition videos were usurping our available server space at over 60 terabytes, with another 10 terabytes of historic digital artifacts including images and software. With the aid of grant funds from Googl
Who really invented the Internet? I was fascinated by the recent kerfuffle over this question, which started with Gordon Crovitz’s July article in the Wall Street Journal. The catch is that even if you could dispel the political agendas of the folks writing (Crovitz wanted to show that private trumps public), or erase
Go behind the scenes of a conservation assessment of a highly anticipated new donation: the Texas Instruments donation of over 1,000 Fairchild Semiconductor patent notebooks.
I love television AND computers and for me the BBC Micro story has both. Besides, I’ve always loved BASIC and in my opinion the BBC Micro is the machine that best delivered BASIC to schools.