IT History Society

New to Bluesky and love the history of computing? We've gathered the museums, archives, historians, and restorers who keep IT history alive into one starter pack — follow the whole field in a single tap 👇 bsky.app/starter-pack...

On this day in 1930, Gladys West was born. Over four decades at the Naval Proving Ground at Dahlgren she programmed the satellite computations behind an accurate model of the shape of the Earth, vital groundwork for GPS. She died this January at 95. ithistory.org/honoree/glad...

Someone should set up a meeting with Steve Wozniak, for the guy who got Claude Code to write Apple II software!

Before the web, there wasn't ONE online world; there were MANY, and they were separate. — CompuServe, Prodigy, GEnie, not just the most famous (arguably AOL) — and for the most part those worlds did not intersect. Thanks to @archive.org, we can still get a peek at what each service was like.

www.tumblr.com/thevaultofth...

What is your favorite fictional robot? Long before anyone had a real one, readers and moviegoers had already met Robby the Robot, HAL 9000, R2-D2, and Data. Did yours shape what you expected real computers to be? Tell us below. #ComputingHistory #ITHistory #Robots

Trade magazines like Computer Player are great sources — nice to see VGHF keeping the 90s PC press within reach.

On this day in 1960, Brewster Kahle was born. He founded the Internet Archive on the conviction that the web is worth keeping, and has been saving it since 1996. Earlier he built WAIS, an internet search system older than the Web. He turns 66 today. ithistory.org/honoree/brew...

The census was the start of mechanized data processing — Hollerith built his punched-card tabulators for the 1890 count. Having 1790 to 1930 digitized and open is a wonderful resource

"Why are we still programming in the same languages?" Bill Joy, who wrote vi and co-created Java, says machines are 2^40 faster than the ones C and Unix were designed for, and "we desperately need something better than Unix, C, Python and Java."

Nosferatu (1922) survives! (in the Internet Archive's collections...) So amazing that someone kept the reels, and then someone else scanned them to save forever.

Three ITHS board members: Bob Frankston, co-creator of VisiCalc, with Secretary and Treasurer Brandon Vogel and Chair @aaronsylvan.com, talking through topics for an upcoming ITHS panel discussion that Bob will lead. More on that soon. #VisiCalc #ComputingHistory

On this day in 1949, Patricia Selinger was born. On IBM's System R she invented cost-based query optimization, which lets a database work out how to answer a question instead of making the programmer say how. She turns 77 today. ithistory.org/honoree/patr...

A fine way to mark Ada’s day — filmed oral histories are the best primary source! Are the full interviews behind these snippets available anywhere, or is the playlist the public cut?

ITHS Chair @aaronsylvan.com and board member David Arscott met with Dag Spicer, senior curator at Computer History Museum in Mountain View, for a long conversation about the oral histories of computing. We forgot to get a photo with Dag, so here's the building... #ComputingHistory #OralHistory

Twenty-five years ago, archaeologist Christine Finn spent a year treating Silicon Valley as a dig site. Her book "Artifacts" (MIT Press) asked what the dotcom era would leave behind. She revisits it at VCF Montréal, Nov 7–8.

Great to see that twenty-seven talks (twenty-three hours of video) from Vintage Computer Festival Midwest are going up on YouTube. Conference proceedings are primary sources! Let’s keep them alive.

People who enjoy the "Little Free Library" trend might enjoy this installation outside the Internet Archive (@archive.org) in California. #InternetArchive #LittleFreeLibrary #Libraries #BookSky

Margaret Hamilton sat for a rare oral history with the Computer History Museum in 2017. With her death this week at 90, it is the best place to hear the Apollo software story in her own words.

Worth adding for the computing-history side: federal procurement files, GAO audits of early ADP systems and National Bureau of Standards reports often preserve hardware details the vendors themselves never published.

Computer History Museum is selling APPLE I [replica] computers at the original price ($666.66)... this is amazing! shop.computerhistory.org/products/byt...

Bill Joy says we're halfway through a 2000-2035 million-million speedup: another 1000x from hardware and 1000x from algorithms still to come. His conclusion isn't "wow," it's "that's very fast depreciation on a trillion dollars of GPUs."

On this day in 1903, John Vincent Atanasoff was born. At Iowa State he and Clifford Berry built the first electronic digital computing device, using binary arithmetic and capacitor memory that had to be refreshed. He would have turned 123 today. ithistory.org/honoree/john...

Colossus (the Bletchley Park codebreaking machine that opened the electronic computing era) has been named an IEEE Milestone. Congratulations to the volunteers at The National Museum of Computing who keep the rebuild running!

A neat piece of preservation infrastructure: scan a book's barcode and find out whether the Internet Archive already holds it. Worth running along your own shelves.

The patch panel is the iconic image of an analog computer: a board of wires you rewire for each problem. Bernd Ulmann, who builds and restores these machines, makes the case for leaving it behind, and shows the reconfigurable computer he built without one. #AnalogComputing #ComputingHistory

By our count this is at least the 5th time computing has been told it was ending the world: automation in the late 1950s, the computer in the missile silo, Japan's Fifth Generation, Y2K, and now AI. How seriously do you take today's forecasts, against those you've lived through? #AI #Y2K #doom

Five thousand out-of-print magazines, digitized and searchable. Congratulations to the Video Game History Foundation, whose archive shows what community scanning and industry partnership can accomplish together!

Peggy Kidwell, curator emerita at the Smithsonian, on a strange feature of the modern museum: the most used computer in the room is the one in your pocket. #AnalogComputing #ComputingHistory

🎂 Celebrating Georg Scheutz, born September 23, 1785. The Swedish lawyer and translator built the first machine to calculate and print mathematical tables, working from Babbage's difference engine design with his son Edvard. He would have turned 241. ithistory.org/honoree/geor...

The Tony Sale Award honors the restoration work that keeps the artifacts of computing history operational. The September 29 in-person ceremony is sold out, but the livestream is still open to anyone!

George Dyson, historian of technology: as we build an essentially unlimited amount of digital processing, more of our computing ends up resting on continuous functions. Analog is back, whether we like it or not. #AnalogComputing #ComputingHistory

Forty years ago the BBC Domesday Project put a portrait of 1980s Britain on interactive LaserDisc, then became a landmark case in digital preservation. A fitting anniversary at the Centre for Computing History.

Clive England of cray-history.net on the bet behind Cray supercomputing: breadth over depth, many simulations over one perfect answer. #AnalogComputing #ComputingHistory

Leave it to the Internet Archive to think of preserving the "under construction" signs we historically ignored (or took for granted, or rolled our eyes at).

🎂 Susan L. Graham turns 84 today. Born September 16, 1942, the longtime UC Berkeley professor helped build Berkeley Pascal and co-created Gprof, the profiling tool still used to find performance bottlenecks in software. ithistory.org/honoree/susa...

David Alan Grier on the 1946 Moore School lectures: the people building digital computers treated analog as the old style, and most of them wanted to set it aside entirely to focus the money and attention on the stored program digital computer. #AnalogComputing #ComputingHistory

One could argue that the FPU specialized co-processor was a first step toward the GPUs that drive modern AI computing..

The Centre for Computing History has a Sun SPARCstation Voyager on the bench… it’s a 1994 attempt at a workstation you could carry (“luggable”?), and a reminder that portable UNIX was once a radical proposition.

A few months ago the Historical Committee at ACM was kind enough to invite @aaronsylvan (Chair of IT History Society) to visit its Annual Meeting. We're very grateful for the outreach; we believe it's important for related organizations to share connections.

Knitting machine punch cards are one of the few strands of computing history still in everyday use — Nichole Misako Nomura's essay on reading and preserving them is well worth your time. See also Jacquard and his programmable looms: ithistory.org/honoree/jose...

Bernd Ulmann, who builds analog computers, predicts that within twenty years they will sit inside nearly every machine as co-processors, about as routinely as graphics cards do now, handling AI and differential equations alongside the digital computer. #AnalogComputing #ComputingHistory

MS-DOS games on Internet Archive!! #RetroGaming #MSDOS #DOSGames #InternetArchive #GamePreservation #RetroComputing #PCGaming

Happy Labor Day! Come see the PDP-10 today at icm.museum

Harvest ran at NSA from 1962 to 1976: an IBM Stretch bolted to a custom streaming #coprocessor, fed by the world's first robotic tape library. (Specialized accelerators have been around for quite a while!) #ComputerHistory #VintageComputing #IBM #NSA #ColdWar

Many people think @atari.com was first, but it was just the first to be *everywhere*. Home #videogames using a television set began years earlier...

🎂 Two hundred years ago this year, Martin Wiberg was born, on September 4, 1826. The Swedish inventor built a calculating machine the size of a sewing machine that could compute and print full mathematical tables, refining the earlier engine of Georg Scheutz. ithistory.org/honoree/mart...

🎂 On this day in 1927, John McCarthy was born. He invented the Lisp programming language and coined the term "artificial intelligence" in 1955, for the Dartmouth conference that founded the field. Turing Award, 1971. He would have turned 99. ithistory.org/honoree/john...

Bernd Ulmann: an analog program is a spaghetti of wires that turns the machine into a model behaving just like the problem you want to solve. #AnalogComputing #ComputingHistory

Long before Anthropic's "Sonnet," home-computer owners typed programs from magazines like "Poetry" to make their machines write verse: a random-number generator plus borrowed phrases like "quoth the raven." Did you ever type a program in from a magazine? What did you first make a computer create?

We recommend traveling to see @tnmoc.bsky.social on Bletchley Park, but second-best would be to check out this long-form (30min) super-tour by @nostalgianerd.com — amazing discussion of some of the very first computing devices (and ending with classic home computers of late '70s and early '80s)!