IN THIS ISSUE

_By Len Shustek
Chairman, CHM

When I was a child, I hated history. It was boring, the teachers made me memorize irrelevant facts, and those facts bore no detectable relationship to my life. If “there is a history in all men’s lives,” as Shakespeare’s Warwick tells King Henry IV, then what’s so special about it? The answer is that some history has impact. It changes lives. It inspires. It teaches. That is the history we must collect, and we must find exciting ways to present it.

This issue of Core has multiple examples of collecting and presenting history that has impact. It starts with the remarkable story of discovering a previously unknown treasure trove of the raw material of history, in the form of hundreds of important artifacts hidden away in a warehouse in industrial Germany and destined for the scrap heap. They were rescued, thanks to the generosity of SAP AG, in a mission worthy of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Then on to another form of rescuing history: gathering the stories of pioneers while they are still available to be told. The Sloan Foundation–sponsored IT Corporate Histories Project used equal measures of web-based high technology and old-fashioned human outreach to accumulate valuable materials for historians and researchers to use.

The excerpts from our oral history of Bill Atkinson and Andy Hertzfeld about their experiences at Apple give us insight into a remarkable company culture at a time when established companies were threatened by young upstarts. There is good advice here, too, from how programmers can be great to how everyone should live life.

We have many remarkable heroes in the computer industry. Here Leslie Berlin presents anecdotes about Bob Noyce from her recent biography. Leslie not only shows us various sides of the Intel cofounder’s personality, but also helps us find the lessons we can learn from his successes and failures.

Finally, we pause in the center section to appreciate the visual beauty of the computer and its component parts. There are many ways that computers are used to create art, but photographer Mark Richards shows us that, when looked at through the right lens, computers are art.

We hope you enjoy this issue of Core and, as always, we welcome your comments.