Simon’s J’s
About five years ago, I noticed a box of punched cards that Senior Curator Dag Spicer had set aside. It had been sent by high-performance computing researcher Lloyd Fosdick to the Museum’s forerunner,...
View ArticleFrom Copenhagen to Edinburgh: SHOT, SIGCIS, & Artefacts 2012
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...
View ArticleHave you got a prediction for us, UNIVAC?
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...
View ArticleIf it moves, it should be Ruggednova
Warfare has been a rich source of technological innovation as long as humans have roamed the Earth. It isn’t much of a surprise then that from early electronic analog and digital computers, to...
View ArticleThe Elbrus-2: a Soviet-era high performance computer
In November of 2012, an event to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the SPARC microprocessor event was held at the Computer History Museum. The star-studded panel of technologists associated with Sun...
View ArticleWhy Analog Computers?
Every once in awhile, I like to go into the Museum’s permanent exhibition Revolution: The First 2000 Years of Computing. It isn’t unusual for curators at many museums to rarely visit the exhibits they...
View ArticleRacetrack Betting Mechanized
On Tuesday, July 16, 2013, a group of almost seventy people attended a CHM SoundByte lunchtime lecture entitled The Totalisator – An Algorithm That Led to an Industry. The audience was a blend of...
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