This collection of materials relating to the history of computing is provided courtesy of the Department of Computer Science at Virginia Tech, and is sponsored in part by a grant from the National Science Foundation (CDA-9312611).
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INDEX
This WWW page is the initiation of a collection of materials related to the history of computing as collected and written by J. A. N. Lee, until recently Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, past chair of the IEEE Computer Society History of Computing Committee and current chair of the IFIP Working Group 9.7 (History of Computing). It was original constructed as part of the course materials for the "Professionalism in Computing" class at Virginia Tech, and in particular as a set of notes and amplification of the materials in the video "The Machine That Changed The World", developed and distributed by WGBH (PBS) and the British Broadcasting Company (BBC). We are hoping to expand the coverage of the video by providing stills for each of the topics in the notes. The best way to access items on this page is through your browser's find/search facility.
A collection of materials intended to describe the history of computing to those interested in the 50th Anniversary of Computing in 1996 was used by students at Virginia Tech to develop a Virtual Museum of Computing that you may find very interesting.
This list includes several pointers to lists which we have not been able to verify fully. We are VERY aware that some of these lists contain errors of both fact and date and thus recommend that persons who use them recognize that they are foremost secondary, if not tertiary sources, and thus should be independently verified.
The materials included here are intended to assist scholars and students in their work, but the use of the materials for other publications (other than links from other pages) requires you to get the appropriate copyright clearance. If you wish to use these materials please send me e-mail
Your comments, thoughts, and possibly contributions, should be sent to me J.A.N. Lee. Links to other pages are particularly welcome. Several contributors have suggested that I add thumbnails for the portraits and figures. Regrettably this page has grown so large that it takes a long time for people to download. If I get time this Fall, I will try to separate the page into separate pages for each of the topics in the index and then add thumbnails. Enjoy the page.
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Women in (the) Computing History
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Throughout 1996 I have written a column for IEEE Computer entitled "looking.back". While each of the columns was edited for length (and occasionally for content) and the figures removed, the original submissions are now available, and should be relevent for many years to come!
CONFERENCES AND MEETINGS
There is nothing here as yet, but if you know of a meeting that needs to be advertised send me an e-mail message.
COURSES
Stanford University STS 161 -- History of Computers.
PEOPLE
Picture of Ada King (nee Byron), Countess of Lovelace Ada; additional pictures of Ada are available on-line, in connection with the Ada Programming Language.
Photograph of six members of the original ALGOL development team at the 1978 HOPL Conference Algol
John Vincent Atanasoff, developer, with Clifford Berry, of a late 1930's electronic computing device that has a claim to be the "first" computer and their ABC machine. Iowa State University has recently opened a WWW archive on Atanasoff. Access seems to be a little slow. Here is another photograph of Atanasoff. And finally a
biography of John Vincent Atanasoff by Hien Chris Do.
Photograph of Isaac L. Auerbach, a founder of IFIP Auerbach
Pictures of Charles Babbage: Babbage
and Babbage
The Charles Babbage Institute has a home page that contains links to several other interesting places, including a brief biography of Babbage.
Another biography of Charles Babbage: Babbage
Photograph of John Backus, leader of the team that developed Fortran Backus
A Bibliography of sources related to the biographies of Computer pioneers has been extracted from the recently published book of Biographies of Computer Pioneers.
Photograph of Charles Bradshaw Bradshaw
Photographs of Vannevar Bush, 1930's developer of the differential analyzer at MIT Bush,Bush
One of Bush's claims to fame is the paper he wrote for the Atlantic Monthly entitled "As We May Think". This same article, together with a 1964 article by Martin Greenberger, is accessible through the Atlantic Monthly archives.
The obituary for Alan Coombs, one of the developers of the Colossus at Bletchley Park, England, during World War II.
An interview with Seymour Cray by David Allison of the Smithsonian Institution.
Photograph of J. Presper Eckert, with John Mauchly and John Brainerd, chief engineer for the ENIAC development Eckert
An interview of Doug Engelbart by Jon Ecklund of the Smithsonian Institution.
Photograph of Jay Forrester, developer of the Whirlwind, and the matrix method of accessing core memory Forrester
An interview with Bill Gates, which appeared on the WWW in December 1994; reproduced with permission, and a biography by Stacey Reitz.
The biography of I. Jack Good, cryptographer and statistician, one of the members of the Bletchley Park team that cracked the German Enigma codes during WW II.
Photograph of Tony (C.A.R.) Hoare, Turing Award winner.
Photograph of Grace Murray Hopper in civilian dress.
Photograph of Grace Murray Hopper in uniform at the 1978 HOPL conference.
Photograph of Harry Huskey, member of the team that built the Pilot ACE at NPL, designer of the SWAC and the Bendix G-15.
Photograph of Steve Jobs (on left) with Steve Wozniak founders of Apple Computer Corp. -- a press release photograph from the WGBH press kit related to Video Series
A biography of Steve Jobs was written by Lee Angelelli, an undergraduate student at Virginia Tech, as part of a class asignment.
Photgraph of Alan Kay.
Photograph of John Kemeny, with Tom Kurtz, developer of the Dartmouth Time Sharing System, and BASIC Kemeny
Jack Kilby, the original developer of the Integrated Circuit.
Photograph of Donald Knuth, programmer par excellance Knuth
As far as I know, John McCarthy is one of only two "pioneers" to have his own home page. Starting from this point there are several other pages of interest; to historians may be McCarthy's own page of historical information, primarily associated with AI and LISP.
Photograph of John McCarthy, developer of LISP, and one of the founders of AI, at the 1978 HOPL Conference McCarthy
Photograph of John McPherson, Past IBM Vice President, supporter of the Fortran project McPherson
Photograph of Peter Naur, member of the Algol team, at the 1978 HOPL Conference Naur
Photograph of Alan Perlis, member of the Algol team, developer of IT, professor of computer science at CMU and Yale, at the 1978 HOPL Conference Perlis
A photo gallery of pioneer women and computers is available through the Yale University WWW pages at http://www.cs.yale.edu/HTML/YALE/CS/HyPlans/tap/photo_gallery.html
A photograph of Piaget.
George Stibitz, the developer of the first binary adder in relay technology died January 31, 1995.
Standard Western Automatic Computer (SWAC) with Harry Huskey at the console SWAC
The Alan Turing Home Page, maintained by Andrew Hodges, the biographer of Turing, is an excellent starting place for a full study of this pioneer. The original page is located at Oxford University (UK) and there is a mirror site in San Francisco.
Photograph of Alan M. Turing
Biography of Alan M. Turing
Photographs of John von Neumann photo1, photo2
Biography of John von Neumann.
A standard photograph of T.J. Watson, Sr.
Photograph of Willis Ware, 1993 recipient of the IEEE-CS Pioneer Award Ware
Photograph of Joe Wegstein, member of the COBOL development group, at the 1978 HOPL Conference.
Photographs of Maurice V. Wilkes, developer and designer of EDSAC, professor, Cambridge University: [1] and [2]
Biography of Maurice V. Wilkes
Neil Wiseman was an very influential faculty member at Cambridge University. A biography and appreciation by Peter Robinson is available .
Photograph of Steve Wozniak (on right) and Steve Jobs, founders of Apple Computer Corp., -- a press release photograph from the WGBH press kit related to Video Series. Woz reminisced on his hopes for Apple in a reponse to a Hotwired article. He is one of two pioneers of whom I am aware has a home page.
Photographs of Konrad Zuse, 1930's designer of a very early binary computer, whose work led to a series of Z-machines [1] and [2].
Biography of Konrad Zuse.
An interesting display about Zuse is also available from the Konrad-Zuse-Zentrum für
Informationstechnik is worth visiting. This also contains a link to his career as a painter.
St. Andrews University (Scotland) maintains a page on the history of mathematics that also contains some historical information about pioneers who influenced computing. However when you see references to the University of Vermont, translate that into Virginia Tech!
A special list of "Multicians" was provided to me by Tom Van Vleck who maintains a special page with respect to the "Multics" project:
- Fernando Corbató
- Peter G. Neumann
- Brian W. Kernighan
-
Dennis M. Ritchie
- Jerome H. Saltzer
- Kenneth L. Thompson
The recent PBS show entitled "The Triumph of the Nerds" has its own web-page. Several PC pioneers, including Bill Gates, Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs, and others are featured. Let us hope that PBS maintains this for a while! The collection of materials includes a chronological history of computing, that is very similar to our Virginia Tech Virtual Museum. The video is available from 1996 Insight Media, 2162 Broadway, New York NY 10024, Ph: (212) 721-6316.
I am seeking nominations for persons to be added to my collection of computer pioneers for the second edition of my book "Computer Pioneers" If you have a suggestion please click here.
MACHINES
A Comprehensive Computer Catalog by Hans B Pufal, is an update (and hopefully with corrections) to Bruce Watson's 1992 "Big List".
GENERATIONS, The Evolution of Computers, an exhibit presented by Data General Corporation, the Intel Museum, and The Computer Museum, is a physical exhibit that is touring the world but which has a virtual presence on the WWW. The linked pages contains several excellent images of 1960s computers and early PCs.
Picture of the original Xerox Alto machine c. 1987 Alto
A story of the reconstruction of the Colossus by Tony Sale at Bletchley Park, and the competition for the "earliest" machine, is clearly heating up! Everything about the current situation at Bletchley Park and Colossus Rebuild Project is now on-line.
Photographs of Charles Babbage's Difference Engine Diff. Eng. and Diff. Eng.
The 50th Anniversary of the unveiling of ENIAC site. Together with
pictures of ENIAC ENIAC,
ENIAC. The IEEE Society on Social Implications of Technology magazine entitled Technology and Society produced a special issue in December 1995 on ENIAC. The special issue of the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing was published in Spring 1996.
A history of computing at BRL contains descriptions of several machines from the ENIAC to the Cray YMP.
The German Enigma encryption machine: Enigma
Discovery of a lost factoring machine, built by a French amateur, E.-O. Carissan,
around 1919.
The National Archive for the History of Computing at the University of Manchester (UK) has information about the Manchester Mark I machine, as well as connections to other items in their archive. A set of pages by the Computer Science department at the University of Manchester is preparing for the 50th Anniversary of the unveiling of the Mark I on 21 June 1948.
A very good report about the Rice Computer (R1) by Adam Thornton is really worth visiting.
Standard Western Automatic Computer (SWAC) with Harry Huskey at the console SWAC
Picture of the original transistor Transistor
Christies of London auctioned off a piece of the original Babbage Difference Engine on October 4, 1995. It fetched over £150,000 and was purchased by the PowerHouse Museum in Sydney, Australia. To access to the description, together with several very good pictures, click here.
The EDSAC is accessible through two routes:
- A page from the University of Cambridge with several (large) pictures of EDSAC.
- Martin Campbell-Kelly's page (University of Warwick) that not only has information about EDSAC, but also gives access to a very nice EDSAC emulator for Macintoshes.
CALCULATING MACHINES
It was not until I moved my office recently that I realized that I had accumulated a fair collection of pre-computer machines, and thus became more interested in calculators.
For a quite good history of calculators see Erez Kaplan's page.
The International Association of Calculator Collectors is building a new collection of web pages.
TI's history of the development of the first hand-held calculator.
The HP Museum. There is an excellent history of the slide rule included.
COMPUTER HISTORY ORGANIZATIONS AND MUSEUMS
The Association for History and Computing, an organization dedicated to the use of computers in historical research.
The Computer History Association of California (CHAC).
A developing on-line museum of HP Calculators.
The 50th Anniversary of the unveiling of ENIAC site. As part of the activities surrounding this event, Prof. Jan van der Speigel led a group creating "ENIAC on a chip".
We are going to be watching carefully for the Museum of Classic Computers
page currently under construction in Japan.
The COMPUTER CONSERVATION SOCIETY of the British Computer Society. The British Computer Conservation Society also has an ftp site which is very interesting.
The Science Museum, Kensington, UK.
The home page of Hal Layer, San Francisco State University, contains links to his collection of classic computers, classic video games, and landmark calculators, updated April 1996. Hal calls this the "Mind Machine Web Museum". (this has two links on this page -- as a museum and as an archive).
A Virtual Museum of Computing with an emphasis on the history of computing in Great Britain (basically a large collection of links similar to this page) is maintained by Johnathon Bowen, Reading University.
A searchable, browsable, Virtual Museum of Computing was built by students at Virginia Tech in Spring 1996. We anticipate moving this site to another machine over the summer of 1996.
The HP Museum.
ARCHIVES AND COLLECTIONS
CalTech archives contain a searchable collection of photographs in which I was able to locate one computer and two calculator images. Perhaps you can find more!
A remarkable, but still incomplete listing of every (?) computer type ever built can be found from other links, but I have pulled it out here since it is so useful. I would suggest that anyone who can provide more accurate dates on the introduction of these machine contact the author.
A set of historic computer images, collected by Mike Muuss, is available at http://ftp.arl.mil/ftp/historic-computers/
Chronology of Events in the History of Microcomputers by Ken Polsson.
The home page of Hal Layer, San Francisco State University, contains links to his collection of classic computers, classic video games, and landmark calculators, updated April 1996. Hal calls this the "Mind Machine Web Museum".
The History of the Development of Parallel Computing by Gregory V. Wilson, a chronological listing Parallel
The Retrocomputing Museum is an interesting on-line collection of programming language software.
An on-line museum related to the Unusual Systems Collection is now available. This page also contains links to several other pages related to the history of computing.
Virtual Library for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, located in Australia has some interesting links, including one to a listing of "firsts". Like any other list, I can find faults with it, but it may be useful.
The Virtual Museum of Computing at Oxford University contains a wealth of information and links.
(repeated link) The National Archive for the History of Computing at the University of Manchester (UK) has information about the Manchester Mark I machine, as well as connections to other items in their archive.
The Los Alamos National Laboratory has posted a "History of Modern Computing in General" that has a brief overview of the work of Zuse, Eckert and Mauchly, and even briefer descriptions of machines that were installed at the laboratory.
PUBLICATIONS
Here is the collected abstracts for the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing from Volume 15 onwards, together with other access to the IEEE Computer Society information. Click on Abstracts once in the Computer Society gopher file.
The IEEE Computer Society Press is becoming a significant publisher of books in the area of the history of computing. To celebrate the 50th Anniversary of the Computer Society, and the 50th Anniversary of ENIAC, I am writing a series of mohtly columns entitled "looking.back" in the IEEE Computer that highlight the events in the history of computing that took place each month. For those of you who want to play reviewer, the draft versions are on-line also. Once in the directory, use your browser's finder to locate a particular month. Your comments on future columns are truly welcome! Obviously this directory is being expanded monthly!
The Jones Telecommunications and Multimedia Encyclopedia has an update section that includes both a history of computing and a history of the personal computer. We would hope that these entries stay on-line!
The beginnings of a history of computing in Sweden has been posted on the web as of 96/06/18. There are two paragraphs on Swedish history and then links to several other sites in Europe. Hopefully this will expand to give us a better understanding of the history of computing in Sweden.
NETWORKS AND INTERNET
A special page by Amdahl Corporation commemorates the 25th Anniversary of Internet and includes several links to historic information: http://www.amdahl.com/internet/events/inet25.html
A short history of the Internet by Bruce Sterling.
While not exactly a history of Internet, this report by Dennis Fazio also contains a view of the development of the system.
An interesting history of networking appears in the September 1995 Issue of Crossroads.
The history of networking and usenet has been developed by Michael and Rhonda Hauben.
INTERESTING ITEMS (Without enough companions to make a category)
Picture of the original bug (now in the Smithsonian Institute) Bug
An interesting story of the QWERTY keyboard, its origins and myths.
A Computer in a Buddhist Temple -- a press release photograph from the WGBH press kit related to Video Series
Questions and Answers from the 1994 ACM/Computer Museum Computer Bowl ComputerBowl
The history of computing at Dartmouth College.
The computer was named the Machine of the Year in 1982 by Time Magazine. The rationale for this selection has been extracted from the Time Inc. pages.
The Machine That Changed The World -- notes on the WGBH/PBS Television Series TMTCTW; Notes were recently added for episodes 4 and 5, courtesy of Osman Balci (Virginia Tech) and links to "side bars" for the first three episodes were expanded. If you can add links to other places of interest that would help students get an expanded understanding of the topics in this video series, send me e-mail.
Talking Machines -- a press release photograph from the WGBH press kit related to Video Series
A Poster announcing the acquisition of a UNIVAC I by Sylvania -- a press release photograph from the WGBH press kit related to Video Series
A special page by Amdahl Corporation commemorates the 25th Anniversary of Unix and includes several links to historic information: http://www.amdahl.com/internet/events/unix25.html
Humor is a dangerous thing when one is dealing with history since it often distorts the facts and creates myths that outlive the facts. This set of quotations has circulated around newsgroups long enough that it is becoming part of history itself! Accept with a grain of salt.
Last updated 96/11/25
© J.A.N. Lee, 1995, 1996