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The Computer History Museum rececntly hosted a forum with John Gertner, the author of a new book about Bell Labs. Here is the link. Gertner discusses the many world-changing inventions and innovations that came out of the Labs, especially during its peak years of innovation from the late 1920s through the 1980s. Among the innovations mentioned is the active communications...

PC World recently ran an interesting piece about vintage DP equipment still being used on a daily basis, for practical purposes. They even found someone using punched card accounting equipment. I don't go back that far, but the other day I got a chuckle from a co-worker when I needed to do a simple calculation. I pulled out my HP-41C...

By now you must know that I am fond of historic plaques, especially ones that have to do with the District of Columbia or Northern Virginia . Here's another one, from Arlington: The full text reads: The ARPANET, a project of the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Department of Defense, developed the technology that became the foundation for the...

Software Advice, an online reviewer of ERP software , has published a four-part series on the history of enterprise software. In the series, Lara Zuehlke, Managing Editor at Software Advice, investigates how computing hardware and software evolved from punched cards all the way to the Internet and social applications. Here’s a link to each of the four parts, with a...

Thirty years ago, the International Business Machines company introduced its first general-purpose personal computer, the 5150. (The IBM 5100 and DisplayWriter were also personal computing devices, but most people don’t count them as a first.) Although I have written about August 1981, I would have forgotten about the anniversary except my friend Tom Pfaeffle linked a BBC article on his...

Today marks the 100th anniversary of the 1911 formation of the Computing Tabulating Recording Corporation through the merger of the International Time Recording Company, the Computing Scale Company and the Tabulating Machine Company. We probably wouldn’t care, except that in 1914 CTR appointed Thomas J. Watson, Sr. as its general manager. A decade later, the company renamed itself the “International...

“Programming” (and programming support) was an old data processing concept that originally was broadly defined as the adaptation of general-purpose devices to specific tasks. Programming therefore goes back to Herman Hollerith wiring and rewiring (programming) his equipment to handle specific jobs. By the early 1930s IBM was distributing information about novel (for the time) plugboard wiring diagrams to customers via...

You have probably heard the news about the failure of Amazon's Cloud computing services, in spite of their claim that it was geographically dispersed, redundant, etc. This is a relatively new phenomenon, but Martin Campbell-Kelly discussed its early genesis in his chapter in our book The Internet & American Business (Aspray & Ceruzzi, 2008) (shameless plug). Anyway, I did some...

We all know very few organizations do live to the age of 100, especially corporations. Those that do obviously tend to get more things right than wrong, and the market rewards them for their behavior. Luck and circumstances are important factors, but increasingly historians observe corporate culture and behavior are too. So putting my historian’s hat on, here is my...

This month is the 47th anniversary of IBM's introduction of the System/360. In other words, the birthday of the modern mainframe architecture as a computing platform. They say that one common flaw with mankind is a failure to learn from our history. Ask any mainframer what is one thing that they take a lot of professional pride in and it’s...