Blog

Make payments with PayPal - it's fast, free and secure! Learn about supporting IT History Society

About Us

The IT History Society is a 501(c)3 not-for-profit organization dedicated to the preservation of knowledge about the people, products, and companies that together comprise the field of computing.

Since 1978 our organization, and its hundreds of members, have worked toward this goal, and we invite you to contribute your own knowledge and memories on this website! (read more)

Simplicity Revisited

A while ago I mentioned a book I was reading called The Laws of Simplicity , by John Maeda. Forgive me if I return to this topic, but it seems too important to ignore. With all the fuss about the products coming from Apple, and the Amazon Kindle, it is time to revisit the topic. I have resisted getting any...
June 07, 2010 By Paul Ceruzzi 0 Comments Read more...

The Latest from the Large Hadron Collider

As of this morning, the LHC is shut down again. By now you've probably heard the reason being floated: the LHC is so powerful it reaches into the future. There, some entity recognizes that generating such energies by Earthlings is dangerous , given our level of expertise. So he or she or it travels back in time periodically to shut...
December 02, 2009 By Paul Ceruzzi 0 Comments Read more...

The Latest from Gordon Bell

A recent news item from the Computer History Museum in Mountain View informs us of the latest that Gordon Bell is up to. It's a project called "MyLifeBits," and is the subject of a new book, Total Recall , by Bell and Jim Gemmell. For a description, I quote from an e-mail sent to me by Alan Weissberger, who has...
September 29, 2009 By Paul Ceruzzi 0 Comments Read more...

Kodachrome Dying: The Fading Away of the Analogue?

Tuesday morning. Guardian read of the day... And a shocking news - for me: Kodak is taking its 'Kodachrome' product range off the market . Kodak's decision is quite understandable. That type of film, which most of those among us below 30 do not really remember, does not sell any more with the rise of ever better equipment and tools...
June 26, 2009 By Sandra Mols 0 Comments Read more...

Those Anniversaries We Love ... And Those We Avoid...

A quick glance at the calendar reminded me the other day that my family birthdays' season is starting up in as every year... This got me to think about the computing birthdays passed during the last decade or so... A quick stroll on-line and so we have had so far, at least, those of: - the transistor , born 1948,...
June 08, 2009 By Sandra Mols 0 Comments Read more...

Geocities

By now you have probably heard that Yahoo! is shutting down its Geocities site. There has been a lot of coverage in the press about this, usually relating to two themes. The first is that it illustrates the worst of the dot.com bubble, as Yahoo! bought Geocities for way too much money, at the height of the bubble, and then...
April 29, 2009 By Paul Ceruzzi 0 Comments Read more...

Pirate Bay, pirates of the modern virtual world

So the verdict is in. After being indicted in February for copyright infringement and the promotion of illegal file-sharing, The Pirate Bay has finally - maybe not so surprisingly - lost its case against the Swedish government. That means one year imprisonment for the four leaders of The Pirate Bay, and a load of cash - 3 millions dollars or...
April 17, 2009 By Sandra Mols 0 Comments Read more...

Computers in Moving Pictures, Then and Now

As part of a search for material for an animation for the local popular science festival, I went back looking out for videos and films usable for computing history. Returning, hopeful, to the on-line prelinger Internet Archive, three videos emerged out, one was On Guard! The Story of SAGE , a film commissioned by the IBM Military Products Division in...
March 10, 2009 By Sandra Mols 0 Comments Read more...

From Berkeley's 'Giant Brains' to Chess Playing Computers...

A couple of weeks ago, Evan Koblentz , president of MARCH, non-profit user group for vintage computer collectors, asked the SIGCIS members ' opinion as regards to E.C. Berkeley's paternity of the expression 'Giant Brains'. Given his famous eponymous 1949 Giant Brains or Machines that Think , of which typescripted draft was sold out for $ 16,000 at the 2005...
February 23, 2009 By Sandra Mols 0 Comments Read more...

Two Steps Forward, Two Steps Back

Last week Palm introduced a new smartphone , designed to compete with Apple's iPhone. It is an amazing device, with all sorts of features that you could hardly imagine could fit on something that small. But there's a price--and it is a lot more than the retail price of the phone. In coming out with the new phone, Palm abandoned...
January 30, 2009 By Paul Ceruzzi 0 Comments Read more...

Pages