A prototype of a quantum processor was donated to CHM during Infineon’s OktoberTech customer event at the Museum. OktoberTech is an annual fun day-long event of customer success stories, set up a bit like a Science Fair, showcasing advances across Infineon’s product portfolio, from AI-powered stethoscopes and farm tractors to partner Cerebras’ 2.6 trillion transistor Wafer Scale Engine.

The author with Infineon System Architect Stephan Schächer and the donated quantum processor prototype.

To dive a bit deeper, ion trap quantum processors like this one are a type of quantum computing technology that uses individual ions as qubits (quantum bits) to perform quantum computations. Qubits, in quantum computing, can exist in multiple states simultaneously, which allows quantum computers to perform certain calculations much faster than classical computers.

In an ion trap quantum processor, ions are typically trapped using electromagnetic fields. Laser pulses are then used to manipulate the quantum states of these ions, enabling the execution of quantum algorithms.

This delicate ballet of physics and engineering is done at 4 degrees Kelvin (-454 degrees Fahrenheit), nearly at 0K (“Absolute zero”—the coldest temperature possible in the universe, and the point at which all molecular motion stops).

The State of the Field

The development of a quantum computer is being pursued with great energy by a handful of institutions and companies, using a variety of approaches (eight at last count) that hold promise, including trapping ions. Each has its own set of advantages and challenges, but some of the main approaches include:

Superconducting Qubits

• Superconducting circuits are used to create qubits that can carry an electric current without resistance.
• Quantum bits are manipulated using microwave pulses, and the interactions are controlled by superconducting circuits.

Trapped Ions

• Ions, typically individual atoms, are trapped and manipulated using electromagnetic fields.
• Qubits are encoded using internal energy levels of the ions, and quantum gates are performed with laser operations.

Topological Qubits

• Utilizes anyons, which are exotic particles with properties suitable for quantum computing.
• Quantum information is stored in the braiding of these anyons, which can create a robust form of qubits less susceptible to errors.

Quantum Dot Qubits

• Qubits are created by confining electrons in semiconductor materials, forming artificial atoms known as quantum dots.
• The spin of these electrons serves as the qubit, and quantum operations are performed using electromagnetic fields.

Photonic Quantum Computing

• Uses photons as qubits, taking advantage of their ability to exist in multiple states simultaneously.
• Quantum gates are implemented using linear optical elements like beam splitters and phase shifters.

Adiabatic Quantum Computing

• Quantum annealing is employed to find the global minimum of a problem’s energy landscape.
• Qubits are slowly evolved from their ground state to a solution state, following the problem Hamiltonian.

Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR)

• Relies on the principles of nuclear magnetic resonance to manipulate spins of nuclei as qubits.
• Typically used in small-scale quantum information processing.

Silicon-based Quantum Computers

• Leverages the properties of electrons in silicon to create qubits.
• Quantum gates are performed using the electron spin as the qubit.

Capturing the Future

While quantum computing is an active area of research with few real-world applications to date, it does hold great promise for complex calculations in the future, for example in cryptography—sending and receiving secret codes—in which trillions of possibilities can be explored in fractions of the time it would take a conventional supercomputer.

Berkeley computer science professor Dave Patterson estimates the first working real-world example quantum computers in about 2030, but CHM is proactively collecting in this area now so that we can capture the early steps people will have taken on the road to quantum computing.

Generations to come will look at these first early steps into quantum computing the way people look at the mainframe computers (or original Sony PlayStations) of days gone by. What will they think of quantum computing and how it will have shaped their world? Because of donations like the Infineon ion-trapping quantum processor prototype, CHM will hold many of the answers.

Main image: Senior Curator Dag Spicer (center) and Acquisitions Registrar Gretta Stimson (right) receive the chip and a quantum IC wafer from Infineon’s Chief Marketing Officer Andreas Urschitz (left) at CHM on October 25, 2023.

SUPPORT CHM’S MISSION

Caring for the collection and accepting donations like Infineon’s would not be possible without the generous support of people like you who care deeply about decoding technology. Please consider making a donation.

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The Center for Cisco Heritage (CCH), a collaboration between Cisco and the Computer History Museum (CHM), was launched in 2013 after internal attempts to save Cisco history faced setbacks. The complications sparked new questions about how to accomplish long-term preservation in a business climate that continues to be forward-focused. In a technology ecosystem so focused on the road ahead, how do we balance the view from the rear-view mirror?

CHM’s experience documenting Silicon Valley culture and history offered an answer. Tapping into the Museum’s professional skill sets and centering our goal of decoding technology, the Center for Cisco Heritage built an archive on Cisco’s campus and collected a wide array of artifacts, hardware, oral histories, ephemera, and multimedia content. In 2017, we opened Our Story, an exhibit at Cisco headquarters, and immediately began to think about how to bring our hard work on the company’s rich history into today’s digital sphere.

Time(line) To Explore

The Center for Cisco Heritage set out to develop a digital experience exploring Cisco history that would be engaging to a wide audience. But in an era where we can search instantly for the answers to most questions, how do we take a panoramic view of history for people with varying levels of interest? How do we balance an important and innovative history with the present-day direction of a large company? How do we balance the individual interests of different units, from engineering to marketing to customer experience? How can we develop a portrait that honors multiple decades of work? The CCH director and archivist debated the best approach for each of these issues. While corporate timelines that show statistics and products from across the years are the norm, they are static documents, more akin to press releases then exhibits or experiences.

Working with Dome Collective, we thought about how to create an exploratory timeline that allows users to see both the depth and breadth of company history without overwhelming them with encyclopedic entries. We wanted to keep the experience playful as well as illuminating. So, to organize Cisco’s heritage, we created four themes: innovation, culture, leadership, and internet event to help guide individuals through the Cisco Story exhibit.

While most company histories are heavy on innovation and leadership, the culture theme is one of my favorite threads in the Cisco Story, weaving in Cisco’s continual commitment to social responsibility and education no matter how the technology shifts over time. It’s exciting to see not only the launch of the Network Academy in 1997, basically the “shop class” of the twentieth century but also the modern impact. What started as a gift of hardware to a local school grew into a global technology education program reaching 7.8 million students in 180 countries within 20 years.

Another unique challenge of corporate archives is the line between modern marketing and the context of historical interpretation. We know that time moves fast in Silicon Valley, so the exhibit is designed to keep up with the pace of change, including modern innovation alongside historic breakthroughs and updated annually.

We invite you to explore heritage.cisco.com for yourself, and join us on June 17 for a virtual opening where you can peek behind the curtain of creating the Cisco Story. Learn more and register.

The post Saving Cisco History appeared first on CHM.

Silicon Valley Magic

Growing up in Detroit, Michigan, Erin Teague had very little exposure to what she calls “all of the magic that is Silicon Valley.” She wishes she had been able to gain a greater understanding of the region’s storied innovation ecosystem that has influenced so many aspects of our lives at a much earlier stage in her career. But, that certainly hasn’t slowed her down. 

Today, Erin is a director of product management at YouTube, where she is the global product lead for several verticals, including Sports, Racial Justice, and new subscriptions businesses. Before that, she led YouTube’s Virtual and Augmented Reality product team, where she was responsible for the YouTube VR app, rated #1 across multiple platforms. Her experience has led her to believe that the most important technological breakthrough that could serve humanity’s current needs might just involve virtual reality. How?

Erin notes that virtual reality has been coined the “empathy machine,” because there is no other technology that can give people the experience of “walking in someone else’s shoes” as a catalyst to inspire both empathy and compassion. She says, “When I think about the challenges of our increasingly polarized society, where the notion of de-escalating conflict is becoming more rare, I believe deeper levels of empathy-driven understanding are core to the solution space.”

It’s this kind of creativity, insight, and empathy of her own that has inspired a variety of organizations to recognize and honor Erin over the course of her career. She is the recipient of the 2019 BET Her Tech Maven Award and has been named as one of the “100 Most Influential Women in Silicon Valley” by Silicon Valley Business Journal. She was included in “The Next Generation of Tech Stars” by Refinery29, a digital media and entertainment website focused on young women, and in “40 Under 40 in Silicon Valley.” Erin has also been named one of Glamour Magazine’s “35 Women Under 35 Who Are Changing the Tech Industry” and one of Business Insider’s “Silicon Valley 100.”

We at CHM couldn’t be more pleased to have the benefit of Erin’s guidance as we decode technology to shape a better future for humanity. Leveraging the “magic” of Silicon Valley’s innovative spirit, visionaries like her will lead the way in creating technology that’s equitable, ethical, and sustainable for all.

Welcome Erin!

Learn more about Erin.

Read about other recent board appointees.

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We’ve got good news!

We were (positively) overwhelmed by the response to our call for proposals for the first-ever Patrick J. McGovern Tech for Humanity Prize. The Prize is intended to foster a global community committed to tech for good—advancing work for social impact, highlighting role models, and inspiring the next generation of innovators. With eighty ambitious proposals from an incredibly talented pool, the distinguished selection committee, chaired by Paul Saffo, had their work cut out for them narrowing down the field to just two Changemakers and nominating and selecting a Luminary.

Part of CHM’s expanding work in advancing tech for good, the Prize, supported by the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation, enables us to recognize and reward people who are doing critical work to benefit humanity. We’re excited to bring forward their inspiring stories.

Innovating Opportunity

Sal Khan, 2021 Patrick J. McGovern Tech for Humanity Luminary

CHM is pleased to honor Patrick J. McGovern Tech for Humanity Luminary Sal Khan, for a lifetime of achievement and his extraordinary impact expanding access to learning worldwide using technology. A pioneer in the world of online learning, Sal is the founder and CEO Khan Academy and the founder of Khan Lab School. Providing free online education to anyone, Khan Academy has reached more than 120 million registered users in 190 countries. Learn more about Sal.

To ensure that Sal’s story is captured for future generations, CHM will conduct an oral history and create a short documentary. We’ll host a celebration to honor his lifetime impact in tech for good. But we’re sure that Sal has more in store, so stay tuned and we’ll keep you up-to-date.

“We can’t shy away from educating the planet,” says Sal Khan, articulating his ambitious vision for shaping a better world. He is an inspiration for all of us, and particularly for the rising stars who are using technology to tackle urgent challenges in every sector.

Innovating Access and Equity

It was a privilege to learn about the work of the extraordinary candidates who applied for the inaugural Prize. Around the world, in every sector, with hope and optimism, talented innovators are working to develop novel technologies to solve today’s urgent challenges.

We are proud to award $50,000 to each of two “Patrick J. McGovern Tech for Humanity Changemakers” for their dedication to tech for good, their future promise, and the potential impact of their proposed projects. To advance their work, CHM will provide Changemakers with access to the Museum’s unparalleled collection, in-house experts, and extensive network. Their stories will be highlighted in special programs and their work chronicled in the permanent collection as models of decoding tech for humanity.

Mercy Nyamewaa Asiedu, 2021 Patrick J. McGovern Tech for Humanity Changemaker

Mercy Nyamewaa Asiedu is a bioengineer and Schmidt Postdoctoral Fellow at MIT. Her project will develop a data-driven, personalized mobile health platform for chronic disease management in sub-Saharan Africa, and improve access to low-cost, artificial intelligence-based cervical cancer diagnostic tools globally. Mercy is excited to have been selected for the Prize and says, “The premise of the Prize, to use technology to address the world’s most urgent challenges, specifically in health equity, is very close to my heart because of my lived experiences and my realm of work. It is an absolute honor to have been entrusted with the honorarium and resources to continue this vital work.”

Learn more about Mercy’s projects.

Michael Bernstein, 2021 Patrick J. McGovern Tech for Humanity Changemaker

Michael Bernstein is a Stanford Computer Science Professor. His project aims to reduce bias in technology by developing a jury-based approach to artificial intelligence and machine learning that considers diverse perspectives. It includes a public-awareness website and open-source models for companies. In accepting the Prize, Michael said: “I am thankful to the people who shape my research: my students, whose creativity and leadership have been central; and those who push tirelessly for better futures for online platforms, whose efforts fuel my desire to do better. My hope is that I’ll keep learning through the Computer History Museum’s insight and support in developing those positive futures, and rallying our collective insights.”

Learn more about Michael’s project.

Stay tuned for updates about the progress of Mercy and Michael’s projects!

Inspiring Work

Mercy and Michael were selected from a diverse and competitive field of candidates. The 80 Changemaker applicants are working in academia, non-profit organizations, corporations, and start-ups of every kind, many founded by themselves. They come from thirteen countries: Australia, Bulgaria, Canada, Georgia, Germany, Great Britain, India, Israel, Japan, Jordan, Kenya, South Africa, and the United States. Their projects ranged across a wide variety of sectors, including agriculture, art, civic engagement, cybersecurity, diversity/equity/inclusion, education, environment, energy, healthcare, law, and social media.

Changemaker finalists will join CHM’s growing global community dedicated to tech for good. Learn more about their work.

You, too, can join the effort to shape a better future by learning more about the technology that has an ever-expanding influence on our lives. Together, we can build a world we all want to live in. Become a member of the CHM community.

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In honor of what would have been the Apple cofounder’s 66th birthday, we’re sharing last night’s Clubhouse conversation with CHM trustees Chris Fralic and Andy Cunningham, journalist Steven Levy, tech media pioneer Esther Dyson, special advisor to Jobs from 1998-2004 Mike Slade, former Apple CEO John Sculley and wife Diane, marketer and entrepreneur Seth Godin, photographer Doug Menuez, marketing guru Regis McKenna, original Mac team member Andy Hertzfeld, iAd director Steven Rosenblatt, and our own CHM CEO Dan’l Lewin. The all-star lineup reminisced and shared some of their favorite—and never publicly told—Steve stories.

“Steve Jobs Stories” on Clubhouse

Take a look at some of the other articles and artifacts from CHM.

Steve Jobs: From Garage to World’s Most Valuable Company

Explore the online exhibit that traces Jobs’ life from his youth building “Blue Boxes” with partner Steve Wozniak —devices that allowed its user to make free telephone calls—to head of the world’s biggest company. The exhibit features rare footage of Jobs from 1980 speaking about the early days of Apple. “We had no idea what people would do with these things,” Jobs says in the video, describing the 1977 Apple II computer that launched Apple into a major technology company.

Explore Steve Jobs: From Garage to World’s Most Valuable Company

New iPhone Exhibit Celebrates the “One Device that Changes Everything”

As part of the iPhone 360 Project, in collaboration with the Museum’s Senior Curator Dag Spicer, Internet History Program Curatorial Director Marc Weber, and the Center for Software History‘s Director David C. Brock and Curator Hansen Hsu, CHM  launched a new exhibit that explores the technology, history, and business and social impact of the revolutionary device. While the 30-foot-high graphic display can be viewed in the Museum’s lobby, we are pleased to share the content from the exhibit below with all of CHM’s virtual visitors.

Read New iPhone Exhibit Celebrates the “One Device that Changes Everything”

Related

On January 9, 2007, Steve Jobs announced three new products—a widescreen iPod, a revolutionary phone, and a “breakthrough internet communications device.” Of course, the iPhone was all three. This suite of articles reveals insights and an array of perspectives on the device from Internet History Director Marc Weber, curator Hansen Hsu, CHM Vice President of Innovation Marguerite Gong Hancock, and journalist John Markoff.

Read iPhone360, featured in Core magazine, 2018.

The Very First “Stevenote”

On January 26, 2014, CHM released this never-before-seen video of the first public showing of Macintosh. Thirty years ago, on January 30, 1984, Steve Jobs came to Boston to introduce his groundbreaking new computer to members of the world’s largest personal computer organization.

Read The Very First “Stevenote”

Fearless Genius: The Digital Revolution in Silicon Valley, 1985–2000

For fifteen years photographer Doug Menuez documented the efforts of a secretive tribe of engineers, entrepreneurs, and venture capitalists in Silicon Valley as they created technology that would change our culture, our behavior, and challenge what it means to be human.

Read Fearless Genius: The Digital Revolution in Silicon Valley, 1985–2000

The Deep History of Your Apps: Steve Jobs, NeXTSTEP, and Early Object-Oriented Programming

Since 2008, over a hundred billion apps have been downloaded from Apple’s App Store onto users’ iPhones or iPads. However, the technology and tools powering the mobile “app revolution” are not themselves new, but rather have a long history spanning over thirty years, one which connects back to the beginnings of software engineering and object-oriented programming in the late 1960s.

Read The Deep History of Your Apps: Steve Jobs, NeXTSTEP, and Early Object-Oriented Programming

From the Collection

The manual of the Apple-1, aimed at hobbyists, contained the computer’s complete wiring diagram and listed the monitor software source. Ronald Wayne, co-founder and briefly a 10% owner of Apple, drew its short-lived logo featuring Isaac Newton. Look inside!

Steve Jobs (left) and Steve Wozniak (right) met in a friend’s garage in the late 1960s. The two of them bonded over their shared interest in electronics and practical jokes. Photograph by Joe Melena.

Steve Wozniak designed the Apple II in 1977. The self-contained unit housed electronics, keyboard and power supply, with the BASIC language in permanent memory. A TV served as the display. The floppy disk drive (1978) and spreadsheet program VisiCalc (1979) made it a blockbuster. CHM Collection 102626726

In 1986 Jobs bought the computer graphics division of Lucasfilm, renaming it Pixar. Pixar had started as a manufacturer of high-performance graphics hardware. Its main product was the Pixar Image Computer, a rendering engine for animation. While the computer was technically sophisticated, its high cost (about $130,000) made it appealing only to well-funded customers such as advanced medical research institutions and government laboratories. There was one exception: Disney. The legendary studio bought several dozen of the systems for use in animation. CHM Collection 102621974

Wozniak and Jobs Blue Box, ca. 1972. The Blue Box allowed electronics hobbyists to make free telephone calls. CHM Collection 102627263

Cover image: “Steve Jobs Explaining Ten-Year Technology Development Cycles.” Sonoma, California, 1986. © Doug Menuez/Contour by Getty Images/Stanford University Libraries

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Learn more about the inspiring people in CHM’s Hall of Fellows. 

The accomplishments of this year’s Fellow Award honorees span robotics, business innovation, computer graphics, entrepreneurship, art, and software and have transformed our world and ignited our imaginations. CHM is pleased to announce its 2021 Fellow Award honorees:

Raymond Ozzie

For a lifetime of work in collaborative software and software entrepreneurship 

As the creator of Lotus Notes, the iconic corporate environment for online collaboration, Ray Ozzie has helped define the modern digital workplace. He has devoted his life since the 1970s to connecting people with computers and developing collaborative tools. Ozzie’s belief in providing access to everyone was inspired by a programmer he met in college, who used a mouth wand to type into the university’s educational system and online community, called PLATO. In 2006, he took over from Bill Gates as Microsoft’s chief software architect, leading the company to develop the Azure cloud service. He’s started several other companies making specialized forms of collaboration software, and more recently founded Blues Wireless to focus on IoT communications.

Full bio

“Building a Better World through Tech for Collaboration”

Register now for this event honoring Ray Ozzie. 

Raj Reddy

For his groundbreaking work in artificial intelligence, robotics, and computer science education 

If you have ever talked into your computer, you can probably thank Raj Reddy. Reddy is an Indian-American professor and researcher in AI and a world leader in speech recognition. He is inspired by the belief that speech recognition software can dramatically improve access to information for the 2.5 billion illiterate people in the world. 

Reddy founded and led the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in 1979, the first robotics department in any US university, developing it into a world-class center for robotics research and education. As Dean of the School of Computer Science at CMU, he also helped create groundbreaking centers related to language, human computer interaction, automatic learning and software research. Over his five-decade teaching career, Reddy has influenced thousands of students, many of whom have gone on to make contributions of their own in speech recognition, computer vision, autonomous robots, and universal access to information.

Full bio

Lillian F. Schwartz

For her pioneering work at the intersection of art and computing

What would the famous artist-engineer Leonardo da Vinci have done with a computer? Lillian Schwartz tried to find out. Schwartz is an early and important artist who explored the use of computers in creating new forms of art and film. Her work, as early as the 1960s, used interactive sensors, kinetic movement, and complex projections and was featured at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). She worked closely with engineers at Bell Labs to push the limits of early computer systems, creating a series of highly-acclaimed and widely-exhibited experimental films incorporating computer animation during the 1970s. She won an Emmy in 1984 for a computer-generated TV public service announcement for MoMA, among many other accomplishments.

Schwartz’s life-long exploration of new materials for artistic expression led her to develop the computer as an artist’s tool and a new way to study and analyze art. 

Full bio

Andries van Dam

For a lifetime of contributions to computer graphics, hypertext, and education

If you enjoy Pixar and Disney movies, there’s a good chance you’ve seen the influence of Andries van Dam. Van Dam is professor of computer science and former vice president for research at Brown University. In his five-decade career, he has taught over 10,000 students the fundamentals of computer graphics, based in part on his coauthored 1982 textbook, Fundamentals of Interactive Computer Graphics, which is a standard reference in the field. Many of van Dam’s students have gone on to make major contributions to computer graphics and its uses in areas as diverse as scientific visualization and entertainment, hyper/multimedia, and the online world.

In 1967 he cocreated a pioneering hypertext system and word processor, which provided inspiration for today’s world wide web. He also cofounded the precursor to SIGGRAPH, the professional society for computer graphics. In the 1970s and 1980s, he played key roles in pioneering the use of computers in education, including what is now called digital humanities.

Van Dam is inspired by a vision that graphical interconnected computing can unleash creative expression and communication for everyone and the conviction that computing should be driven by ethics.

Full bio

A Yearlong Celebration

This year’s program will look different from years past. Working with the creative event firm e2K, CHM has adapted its signature program from a single-evening gala to an immersive, yearlong all-virtual experience. Dynamic programming will spark important conversations, invite new perspectives, and inspire innovative ideas about how technology can shape a better future. Topics will explore influential change in a variety of fields and disciplines and touch on themes such as trust and connection, diversity and inclusion, leadership and ethics, and creativity and self-expression.

It is also the first time the Fellow Awards will be accessible to people around the globe, allowing CHM to engage and reach new audiences. Virtual events will feature notable guest speakers and digital content will honor Ozzie, Reddy, Schwartz, and van Dam throughout the year, with public programming and exclusive VIP opportunities for each Fellow happening once a quarter. Moving to a virtual program has afforded CHM a rare opportunity to reimagine tradition. The prestigious program will continue to be supported by collecting, education, and research efforts that reflect the groundbreaking work of each Fellow and preserve their stories for future generations.

This year’s Fellow Awards, presented by program sponsor Accenture for the eighth year, will kick-off on March 18 with a virtual event that celebrates Ray Ozzie. Events for Raj Reddy, Andy van Dam, and Lillian Schwartz will follow in June, September, and December respectively.  

About the 2021 CHM Fellow Awards

The 2021 CHM Fellow Awards marks the Museum’s first-ever virtual Fellow Awards. CHM will celebrate the 2021 Fellows in a yearlong four-part series of thought-provoking virtual events and engaging digital content that explores the story and impact of each honoree and the present and future of tech for humanity.

Learn more about this year’s honorees and the 2021 Fellow Awards.

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“Copper clad laminate.” 

“Life sciences technology.”

“Facebook.”

“Airplanes and networks.”

These are the technologies that had the biggest effect on the lives of CHM’s five new trustees. Along with the stories explaining why they were chosen, these answers are unique, thoughtful, and highly attuned to outcomes and impacts, just like the individuals who offered them. CHM is honored that these accomplished professionals will be bringing their experience and expertise to help us advance our mission to decode technology for everyone to shape a better future. Let’s get to know them.

Andy Cunningham

The Macintosh

Andy Cunningham came to Silicon Valley in 1983 to work for marketing guru Regis McKenna and help Steve Jobs launch the Macintosh, which just happens to be the technology she believes had the biggest effect on her life. Andy is the founder and president of Cunningham Collective, a marketing, brand, and communication strategy firm dedicated to bringing innovations to market. Over the years, her firm has worked with product managers in a variety of tech sectors, and she’s clear that their focus on “better, cheaper, faster” technology doesn’t apply to CHM. Instead, the Museum’s mission to decode technology means figuring out what it means to society. With Andy as inspiration, CHM might, for example, explore how the powerful new technology the Macintosh put in the hands of creative individuals like her shaped their careers, experiences, and the world they lived in. CHM stories like these can help people understand the broader implications of the technology they use every day.

Read Andy’s bio.

Nancy Duarte

Copper clad laminate

“The technology with the biggest impact on my life was the technology that brought me to Silicon Valley from a tiny town in Northern California,” says Nancy Duarte. “My first job here was in sales for a distributor that sold the raw materials to make layers on printed circuit boards. So, I’d say copper clad laminate.” In three brief sentences, the founder and CEO of Duarte Inc, the largest communications firm in Silicon Valley, transforms an insulating plate into a compelling conclusion to a classic success story. It’s easy to see why she’s known as the “Storyteller of Silicon Valley” and how her method of incorporating story patterns into business communications has served the highest-performing brands and executives in the world. To move humanity forward, Duarte believes that we must reflect on the past, honoring its heroes and learning from their insights. She notes that innovators, engineers, and dreamers have redefined the world. We’re capturing their stories at CHM.

Read Nancy’s bio.

Joe Hurd

Life Sciences Technology

New CHM trustee Joe Hurd believes that innovations in technology related to health have saved countless lives. A technology executive and strategic advisor whose career has taken him around the world, he brings an all-encompassing vision of humanity to his life and work. Joe focuses on the “for everyone” in CHM’s mission to decode technology and believes that CHM can be a bridge to the entirety of society, beyond engineers and product managers. The Museum, he says, can and should tell stories that highlight tech’s impact on non-tech fields, like healthcare, education, voting and elections, housing and transportation, and also explore what it means for Latinx, or LGBTQ+, or Black people. Joe reminds us that tech innovations often have unintended consequences, like social media’s threats to civil liberties, or how paying online with a credit card is a great convenience until the database gets hacked. CHM is preparing people to make informed decisions about how they engage with technology.

Read Joe’s bio.

Sanjay Nair

Facebook

Facebook, despite all its perils, has allowed Sanjay Nair to stay in close touch with his family and friends throughout a career at Edelman that has included leadership positions in Singapore, China, the Western United States, and currently in Shanghai as Global Chair of Edelman’s Technology sector. For Sanjay, the ubiquity of technology in daily life and work throughout the world, means that technological citizenship is more important than ever. He believes that “Knowing how technology is evolving and influencing business, society, relationships, politics, productivity and trust is fundamental to meaningful human existence.” Coming to terms with tech’s influence means that a future of shared prosperity can only be reached by ensuring access and inclusiveness to technology. CHM shares stories that inform and inspire, nurturing the curiosity and continuous learning necessary to help everyone thrive in a digital world.

Read Sanjay’s bio.

Ray Rothrock

Airplanes and Networks

Now executive chairman of cyber security firm Red Seal, Ray Rothrock says that airplanes and networks facilitated his long and successful career funding startups as a venture capitalist at Venrock. He explains, “Airplanes allowed me to travel to brilliant people in all places of the world to find the technology that would change the world.” Ray views the internet, what he calls the network, as a new kind of “real estate,” so cheap it is practically free, on which to build a whole new world. Today, he says, we’re like the first settlers in a new land. We’re living in the early days of a tech revolution where the greatest entrepreneurs can paint a picture of the future. Ray imagines that future as one in which technology serves humanity so well that it becomes a kind of appliance operating in the background, freeing people to focus on their relationships with other people rather than their technology. There couldn’t be a more perfect expression of CHM’s guiding vision: Humanity forward.

Read Ray’s bio.

The post Introducing CHM’s Newest Trustees appeared first on CHM.

Monday, March 16, 2020, started like any other day at the Museum: staff and volunteers welcomed visitors to our exhibits and behind-the-scenes employees were busy planning the next event, developing content, archiving the collection, or working on museum operations. The executive staff was gathered for a weekly meeting, discussing the potential unfolding impact of COVID-19 when we received notification that Santa Clara County was implementing a “shelter-in-place” directive effective Tuesday, March 17 at 12:01 a.m.

In the midst of change, we found ways to be creative and adapt and, as a result, have become more open than ever! Our new digital front door—our website—has allowed us to reimagine the museum experience, including how we host events, share activities and resources, and provide access to exhibits and tours.

That day the Museum staff made the transition from our place-based office life to working from home. Looking back, the entire effort was a balance of teamwork, community support, new tools at the right time, and most importantly digging deep to find a new level of stamina and creativity.

In normal times, the museum field is very welcoming and supportive. Museum professionals often reach out to each other to share ideas or pick each other’s brains. And during the early days of the pandemic it was no different. Just three days after the shelter-in-place order, Bay Area museum CEOs and directors set-up a weekly zoom call to share information, strategy, and operational plans. Discussions ranged from finances and the Payroll Protection Plan to new digital strategies; how to recoup lost revenue to how to create virtual education or gala events; what to do about summer camps to how to care for and feed the animals in zoos and aquariums. Three things really struck me about these conversations: a deep commitment to mission, a desire to serve audiences no matter what, and a “staff first” mindset as we worked to create a collaborative and supportive virtual work environment. In some ways the weekly group meeting felt like therapy.

Within the CHM community, we  made communication a priority. The executive staff met daily to check in with each other and their teams, which now continues three times a week. The CEO wrote the board of trustees “weekend updates” on Fridays. We implemented virtual all-hands meetings while departments set-up regular check-ins. We launched a popular #athome channel on Slack (a messaging app) so that staff could share their working-from-home highs and lows but generally to make each other laugh.

CHM’s #athome channel on Slack has become the place for sharing recipes, gardening hacks, pets, and more!

The marketing team sent updates to volunteers and members. And,  the development team reached out to museum members, wishing them and their families well and letting them know how the Museum was doing. First and foremost, the health and safety of our staff, volunteers, members, and visitors were our top priority. 

From an operations standpoint, because CHM was deemed a “Nonessential Business,” as defined by the state, most of the staff, volunteers, and contractors have vacated the premises to work from home. A small team continues to work on-site to monitor the safety and security of our building and collections. We are also proactively working through scenarios both short and  longer term to prepare for the pandemic’s effects on the local economy and cultural and business environments. The CHM finance team deserves high praise for securing the Payroll Protection Plan for CHM, allowing staff  to stay employed as long as possible. Unfortunately some Bay Area museums have not fared as well. For all of the local and national museums, the goal has been to preserve staff and uphold mission as long as possible in hopes of weathering the  storm and returning intact and, if possible, even stronger. We sincerely hope to open our doors as soon as it is safe.

It also turned out that our decision to improve the Museum’s digital infrastructure about a year ago really paid off during the current crisis. First, the Museum launched a new website in fall 2019 with significantly improved functionality, allowing us to build and publish digital content more quickly and to re-package our online content for an “at home” audience. 

Check out all of CHM’s virtual activities and resources, perfect for at-home learning. Our resources introduce technological and historical concepts in creative and engaging ways for learners of all ages.

Second, the IT team relocated services like our helpdesk, office drives, collaboration tools, etc. to the cloud,  allowing them to continue to remotely support staff with minimal interruption. We were also in the middle of an institution-wide upgrade of our donor and customer systems service systems to Salesforce. Shelter-in-place gave staff the opportunity to focus on this ambitious project, and staff who normally worked at the front desk and store were able to participate in the migration and quality control. And last but not least, the Museum was fortunate to have received a donation of new laptops from Microsoft. This was big news for the staff, as some of us had been working on 10-year-old laptops. With some long days and careful planning, the IT team configured and delivered laptops in the final hours on our last day at the Museum. It was truly a remarkable morale booster to leave the mothership and face an unknown world with a new laptop, a lifeline to each other. 

And then there is Zoom. The amazing, exhausting platform we are living in day to day. For the Museum, mastering Zoom has become a critical priority in order to engage our audiences through our popular speakers series, CHM Live. Just three weeks after shelter-in-place, we pivoted from in-person events to virtual events—first on April 27 with Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott on the growing digital divide between rural and urban America and then on May 18 with Affectiva CEO Rana el Kaliouby on emotional AI. And while we are still discovering the mysteries of Zoom, our media team is well on its way to Zoom mastery, not just for upcoming events but also for our oral history program. We are shipping pop-up kits complete with a lighting solution (lighting is everything, they say), external microphone, and camera to achieve the highest quality possible given the circumstances. These are all skills that will serve us well in the long run, as they will allow us to collect and tell more stories than ever before. And you can’t beat the endless possibilities of self-expression with those Zoom backgrounds. 

Even though our all-staff meetings and museum happy hours may look a little different, our HR staff has made sure that CHMers still feel a sense of community.

 The education team is also adjusting to the “new normal” and exploring how to reach youth through a digital first strategy. Pilots and prototypes are underway to virtualize our workshops and work with partners with distribution platforms. The team is thinking out of the box (literally) and exploring how to create programs that not only have a positive impact on human lives but also bring a smile on their faces. In March, our team re-organized our website to make accessible activities and resources for our at-home audiences, including a popular virtual tour of Revolution, videos and lesson plans for families and adults as well as a new virtual version of our family-oriented Revolution scavenger hunt, which has been very successful with over 1,500 visits in just four months. 

You might wonder how the collections team, whose daily work is to care for the world’s largest collection of computing artifacts, archives, and historical software, might do their job from home. The answer is one part timing and three parts creativity. The team was in the final months of a federally funded collection processing grant and was able to complete the work by meticulously transporting remaining items home to process while also finalizing finding aids and reports. Much to the group’s surprise they found remote work freeing in terms of thinking through new ways to work together, not unlike moving into a new empty house and experimenting with solutions you never thought possible in the old space. The team is actively exploring new tools like Airtable, a collaboration app that  consolidates multiple spreadsheets and databases in the cloud, and has already used it to put the collections disaster plan into the cloud, create tracking and sorting views for our  1,000+ oral history collection, and respond to research requests more expediently. They’ve even found themselves having fun on CHM’s social media.

CHM’s collection and curatorial teams have found a new way to share our exhibits with everyone via social media, enlisting the help of a very special and on-the-loose host: Shakey the Robot.

Finally the team has put together plans and funding proposals for the Museum’s new initiative OpenCHM, which includes making CHM’s collection more accessible and searchable online by cataloging the collection in innovative ways and expanding the use of digital tools to aid in search, retrieval, and the creation of mini-galleries on the fly. We want to open up the collection to scholars at the intersection of digital technologies and humanities as well as to the public itself to use the collection for research and creative projects. 

I don’t want to paint too rosy a picture because it has been very challenging for everyone. Balancing work and parenting. Worrying about our family nearby or far away that we can’t visit. We are all working longer hours both to get the work done and to reimagine and implement a new kind of museum. We miss our colleagues, our work spaces, our collections, our exhibits, our programs, our visitors, our trustees, and our members.

CHM Staff celebrates the opening of its new Learning Lab in 2019.

We miss all these things we have built together over the course of time. But these cherished spaces, objects, and people are not gone; they are merely in suspended animation. For now we must turn our attention to the digital world and new ways of thinking. It’s an opportunity, really.  And we are embracing it. It’s a mindset shift that is fitting for a museum that explores how technology can shape a better future. And some time, in that beautiful future we are all longing for, we will bring together our physical treasures and our shiny new digital world and be a better museum for it. Special thanks to our hard working staff, dedicated volunteers and trustees, museum colleagues and members and donors and those we have lost. Thank you all for your camaraderie and support. 

Virtual CHM Live Events

Reprogramming The American Dream with Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott

Girl Decoded: Rana el Kaliouby in Conversation with NPR Contributor Aarti Shahani

Maintenance and invention: Lessons from Hubble with Kathryn Sullivan

Check for Upcoming Events

Missed an event? Check out our CHM Live recaps.

Activities and Resources

• Revolution Virtual Scavenger Hunt, Grades 6–12
• Virtual Tour of Revolution
• Design the Future: For Families in the Classroom

View All Activities and Resources

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