March 19, 2012 Paul Ceruzzi
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.
September 28, 2011 Paul Ceruzzi
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.
September 26, 2011 ITHS Administrator
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 quick summary of the history each covers.
August 12, 2011 Joel West
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.)
June 16, 2011 Joel West
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.
April 27, 2011 Steve Guendert
“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 a publication called Pointers. Some of these diagrams were created by IBMers, but more importantly, many were created by customers who were willing to share their
April 22, 2011 Paul Ceruzzi
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).
April 4, 2011 James Cortada
April 1, 2011 Steve Guendert
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.
March 31, 2011 Michael Baylor
There are many measures of success; wealth, power and fame are the most common.