He likely arrived in Paris from Darmstadt, Germany, by train that January, exactly seventy years ago. At 53, and a full professor of applied mathematics and the founding director of the Institut für Praktische Mathematik at the Technische Hochschule Darmstadt, Alwin Walther was among Germany’s leading figures in comput
Today election news, from candidate tweets to campaign trail happenings, is widespread across various media, delivered personally to us via the internet on our device of choice. But in 1996, getting election news other than through traditional media, like television, radio, and newspapers, was a novel idea.
Last week Apple announced its switch from Intel to its own ARM-based processors for all future #Macs. Apple has done this multiple times in its history, starting with the transition from Motorola 68000 chips to PowerPC in the early 1990s.
As CHM continues its commitment to decoding the history and impact of AI, we are honored to preserve and make accessible these unique discussions with some of the field’s leading pioneers
Until recently, across a half-century perhaps fewer than a dozen people had ever had the opportunity to read Dennis Ritchie’s dissertation—the intellectual and biographical fork-in-the-road separating an academic career in computer science from the one at Bell Labs leading to C and Unix. Why?
Charlie Bourne was an expert in computerized search for 40 years before Google. CHM has recently finished cataloging his unique collection of materials documenting the history of online search and information systems from the 1950s onward, supported by a generous grant from the National Archives.
The discovery of the Whirlwind’s Blackjack contributes to the historical record of games being created and implemented on early electronic digital computers from the late 1940s and early 1950s. As part of a project to restore Whirlwind software, we’ve recovered the game from original tapes in the CHM archive.
In celebration of Unix’s 50th anniversary, the CHM Software History Center is delighted to make publicly accessible for the first time some of the earliest source code produced in the Unix story.
Robert W. “Bob” Bemer - who worked at Lockheed's Missile Systems Division in Van Nuys and who would become its IBM 650's power user - carefully cut out the article and placed it into a scrapbook. In 2018, through its Access to Historical Records grant from the National Archives' National Publications and Records Commis
The photograph was dated 1950, a date when a now unimaginably small number of humans had ever beheld a computer, no less touched one, and when unabashed racism and discrimination was endemic on the American scene. Who was the young African-American man who nevertheless sat at the controls of this storied machine? What
