IT History Society

Back in a previous century — when I was a doctoral student and aspiring academic — I met some interesting researchers who were then trying to contradict (or at least temper) some of the wild claims made about the first mover advantage. Anyone knows the computer industry knows that IBM didn’t invent the mainframe, Sun the workstation or Apple† the...

I listened to a radio program on the subject of trap streets. Fictitious streets, towns and other pieces of geography added to a map made copying detectable, since if the other map had been independently created it could not contain these inventions, a trap. This phenomenon has come into sharp relief because of the rise of computer map systems, either...

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...