Database Committee

Initial Agenda for 2026

The IT History Society maintains a large public database of hardware, software, companies, and individuals associated with the development of information technology. While this database represents a significant effort spanning many years, we are also aware it has many limitations and open questions.

The issues below summarize challenges already understood, and serves as a starting point for the committee’s discussion. These items are not presented as conclusions, but as areas where thoughtful review and guidance are needed.

• Taxonomy and classification
  • Taxonomy needs review; some categories seem arbitrary (for example, distinctions such as “desktop computer” vs. “personal computer” often reflect how products were advertised at the time rather than consistent criteria).
  • If we retain this type of taxonomy, we likely need the ability to assign multiple categories to a single item.
• Data completeness is “lumpy”
  • Coverage is uneven across categories: for example, the database includes 1,795 calculators (probably not all worth keeping) but only 3 sound cards.
  • This imbalance suggests that some categories should become much more comprehensive, or else be reduced or removed to maintain coherence.
• Temporal scope and cutoff questions
  • The 2007 database initiative sought to track essentially every object, but exponential growth in recent years creates both scale challenges and ambiguity.
  • For instance, the Internet-of-Things (IoT) increases the number of potentially "IT" devices into the millions.
  • A "Year 2000" cutoff has been considered, but that could severely limit utility; alternatively, we may need a better focus on tracking only the items that matter most.
• Hand-curated topic areas
  • We invested significant effort into curating a few topics that are especially well loved—such as Video Games and Mobile Phones.
  • These pages have been well received, and we may consider investing further in similarly curated collections.
• Company Histories
  • Filtering by company can be fascinating, as with Apple.
  • Many companies have internal archivists; there may be opportunities to coordinate with them to improve completeness and accuracy.
  • The Society may also explore the possibility of funding operations with revenue earned by providing historical research and archival advisory services to companies that do not yet have a well-made archive.
• Main Databases (as of 2025)
  • Hardware: 7,373 with images (10,763 total)
    • See above; some categories are rich but many are lacking
  • Software: 1,368 with images (1,709 total)
    • Woefully incomplete across all categories
  • Companies: 93,302 with images (94,396 total)
    • Majority of entries via bulk transfer from Crunchbase authorized under our not-for-profit status
    • Many entries are not truly IT, or are tiny or historically insignificant
  • Honor Roll
    • Needs broader representation, including more women.
    • Needs fresh research on dates of birth/death and improved sourcing.
    • Needs better photos; occasionally we receive copyright complaints indicating an image may be unauthorized.
  • Resources
    • Intended as an index of other IT history resources, but is now severely out of date.
    • Includes many random personal web pages, some of which are no longer online
    • We should examine what's being done at archivists.org, to consider partnership or borrowing best-practices from them
    • Maybe we want to maintain our own directory of corporate archivists?
    • Or at least a well-curated list of other Computer History organizations?
  • Quotes
    • Many were taken from UNIX motd (“message of the day”) and are too well-known to be interesting
    • Might exist somewhere discrete like a header or footer that's auto-generated every time our site serves a page?

Former Archivists

At an earlier stage, an advisory group helped inform archival and database-related stewardship. The Society is grateful for their contributions, and we acknowledge them here as part of our history.

• Bruce Bruemmer — Cargill
• Paul Lasewicz — IBM
• Henry Lowood — Stanford University
• Amy Stevenson — Microsoft
• James Sumner — National Archives for History of Computing, University of Manchester
• Alfred Wegener — Heinz Nixdorf MuseumsForum
• Pennington Ahlstrand — Consulting Archivist