Past Events

Ethernet 40th Birthday Party Celebrations and Charity Auction Awards Dinner (May 22nd - Evening):

“Ethernet Idol” Innovation Awards: From a short list of the industry’s most innovative and dynamic contenders, a team of analysts and IT industry gurus have eliminated all but their top three contestants. The three finalists will each make a brief presentation to the assembled dinner guests before a select panel of judges including representatives from PARC.

Celebrity auction in aid of STEM Education: We need more students that excel in science, math, technology and engineering to become contributors to the global technology marketplace. High-tech companies have vacancies due to a lack of qualified candidates, and the demand for scientists and mathematicians is projected to grow dramatically. Over 50% of US 8th graders receive instruction from a science and math teacher without a relevant degree or real world experience to inspire their students.

The Computer History Museum, as a 2012 STEM Innovation Award Winner, and HP Catalyst Initiative participant, is proud to raise money for Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) education by hosting tonight’s Ethernet Celebrity Auction.

Bids will help educate tomorrow’s innovators.

For the past five years, I've sat at a desk next to Sheryl and I've learned something from her almost every day. She has a remarkable intelligence that can cut through complex processes and find solutions to the hardest problems. Lean In combines Sheryl’s ability to synthesize information with her understanding of how to get the best out of people. The book is smart and honest and funny. Her words will help all readers—especially men—to become better and more effective leaders.
- Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO, Facebook


Thirty years after women became 50 percent of the college graduates in the United States, men still hold the vast majority of leadership positions in government and industry. This means that women’s voices are still not heard equally in the decisions that most affect our lives. In Lean In, Sheryl Sandberg examines why women's progress in achieving leadership roles has stalled, explains the root causes, and offers compelling, commonsense solutions that can empower women to achieve their full potential.

Sandberg is the chief operating officer of Facebook and is ranked on Fortune’s list of the 50 Most Powerful Women in Business and as one of Time's 100 Most Influential People in the World. In 2010, she gave an electrifying TEDTalk in which she described how women unintentionally hold themselves back in their careers. Her talk, which became a phenomenon and has been viewed more than two million times, encouraged women to "sit at the table," seek challenges, take risks, and pursue their goals with gusto.

Join Google's Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt as he moderates what is certain to be a fascinating conversation with Sandberg about women, leadership and so much more.

This event is part of the Museum's acclaimed Revolutionaries speaker series, featuring renowned innovators, business and technology leaders, and authors in enthralling conversations often with leading journalists. Our audiences learn about the process of innovation, its risks and rewards, and failure that led to ultimate success.

We are very pleased that our partner Kepler's Books will be onsite before and after this event selling copies of Lean In.

And, we are very pleased that CSPAN Book TV will be onsite taping this event for future broadcast.

Are you a 5th-12th grade student who wants to learn about building stuff with computers and electronics than they teach you in school? Then it's time to start teaching yourself!

Hack the Future is an all-day party / hackathon to show you what it's like to be a hacker and see if it's for you. We won't tell you what to do. You'll be free to work on whatever you want. We'll try to keep you from getting stuck, and we'll give you a place to start (if you want one). This is a unique opportunity to learn the state of the art in software and hardware design and engineering from mentors in Bay Area startups and companies like Facebook and Microsoft.

Parents, don't reserve a ticket for yourself. We encourage you to let your children learn on their own!

We'll be serving snacks and beverages throughout the day, and we’ll also serve lunch. Every young hacker gets a one-of-a-kind Hack the Future 7 t-shirt with the awesome art shown, screen printed beautifully just for this event. Please remember that all young hackers should bring a laptop! Don’t leave home without one.

The late nineteenth century was a period of explosive technological creativity, but arguably the most important invention of all was Thomas Edison’s incandescent light bulb. Unveiled in his Menlo Park, New Jersey, laboratory in 1879, the light bulb overwhelmed the American public with the sense of the birth of a new age. More than any other invention, the electric light marked the arrival of modernity.

The Age of Edison places the story of Edison’s invention in the context of a technological revolution that transformed America and Europe in these decades. Edison and his fellow inventors emerged from a culture shaped by broad public education, a lively popular press that took an interest in science and technology, and an American patent system that encouraged innovation and democratized the benefits of invention. And in the end, as Freeberg shows, Edison’s greatest invention was not any single technology, but rather his reinvention of the process itself.

Freeberg weaves a narrative that reaches from Coney Island and Broadway to the tiniest towns of rural America, tracing the progress of electric light through the reactions of everyone who saw it. It is a quintessentially American story of ingenuity, ambition, and possibility, in which the greater forces of progress and change are made visible by one of our most humble and ubiquitous objects.

Please join us as we welcome Ernest Freeberg, the distinguished professor and historian, for a conversation with John Hollar about the technological revolution Edison's light bulb unleashed.

We are very pleased that KQED FM will be onsite taping this event for broadcast Thursday, April 11 at 8pm. Additionally, C-SPAN Book TV will be onsite taping this event for future broadcast.

Our partner Kepler's Books will be on hand selling copies of the Age of Edison before and after this event, with a author book signing to follow.

By integrating democratic government with cutting-edge American innovation, the lieutenant governor of California charts a bright future for open-source America

Citizenville is the story of how ordinary citizens can use new digital tools to dissolve political gridlock and transform American democracy. As social networking and smart phones have changed the way we communicate with one another, these technologies are also changing our relationship with government.

Drawing on wide-ranging interviews with thinkers and politicians, Citizenville is the first book by Lieutenant Governor Newsom. He broke new ground as the mayor of San Francisco, one of the most high-tech, experimental, and progressive municipalities in the nation. But when Newsom’s tenure as mayor began, he found that San Francisco was behind the likes of Estonia and South Korea in terms of digital governance. Newsom’s quest to modernize one of America’s most modern cities—and the amazing results he achieves—form the backbone of this far-reaching book.

Lieutenant Governor Newsom explains how the problems of twenty-first-century America are too big and too expensive for the government simply to buy solutions. Instead, we must innovate our way out. Just as the post office and the highway system provide public infrastructure to channel both personal and private enterprise—a platform upon which citizens can grow—so too could a modern digital government house the needs, concerns, information, and collaboration of an enlightened digital citizenry.

KQED’s Forum host Michael Krasny will do moderating honors tonight. The Museum is proud to welcome California’s Lieutenant Governor and Michael Krasny to our stage for what is certain to be a captivating conversation. Please join us.

Our partner Kepler’s Books will be on-site selling copies of Citizenville before and after the program. Gavin Newsom will be signing books immediately following the program's end.

We are very pleased that C-SPAN's Book TV will be on-site taping this event for future broadcast.

Revolutionaries is the Museum’s acclaimed speaker series distributed throughout the world on multiple platforms. It features renowned innovators, business and technology leaders and authors in enthralling, educational conversations often with leading journalists. Our audiences gain insight into the remarkable process of innovation, its risks and rewards, and failure that led to ultimate success.


We are very pleased that KQED FM will be onsite taping this event for broadcast on March 6 at 8pm.

I could either watch it happen or be part of it.
Elon Musk on joining the Internet Revolution

If you had a chance to go back in time and work with Howard Hughes when he was creating TWA, if you had a chance to be there at that moment when it was the dawn of a brand new era, wouldn’t you want to do that? That's why I'm here.
Dr. Garrett E. Reisman
NASA Astronaut (former) and Senior Engineer, SpaceX
On CBS' 60 Minutes March 16, 2012


Elon Musk is living two ultimate boyhood fantasies: creating a sports car company and a rocket launch corporation. As co-founder of PayPal, Musk helped transform payment online systems and then, like a true revolutionary, set his sights on electric cars and space transport.

Today Elon Musk is CEO of both Tesla Motors and SpaceX. He also serves as chairman of SolarCity, the solar power provider.

In 2008, Musk was named as one of the 75 most influential people of the 21st century by Esquire magazine and one year later, the National Space Society awarded Musk their Von Braun Trophy, given for leadership of the most significant achievement in space. In 2010, Musk was the youngest recipient of the Auto Executive of the Year Innovator Award and was listed as one of Time Magazine's 100 of the World’s Most Influential People. His life story was the inspiration for the Iron Man movies about an executive turned space hero.

Join Alison van Diggelen of Fresh Dialogues for a lively conversation with Elon Musk about what inspired his entrepreneurial journey from South Africa to Silicon Valley; the lessons he learned at PayPal, Tesla Motors, SpaceX and SolarCity; and how he manages to lead two ground-breaking companies simultaneously. Why does he believe that electric cars are a vital component in the move away from oil to a more sustainable energy economy? And what is behind his fascination with creating a multiplanetary future for mankind, including a self-sustaining base on Mars?

This event launches our 2013 Revolutionaries speaker series and promises to be an inspiring and educational evening.

The Revolutionaries lecture series complements the launch of the Computer History Museum's permanent exhibition, Revolution: The First 2000 Years of Computing.

We are very pleased that KQED FM will be onsite taping this event for broadcast Thursday, January 24 at 8pm.

Mark Cerny is one of gaming's most influential designers, a true "game changer." He's received the International Game Developers Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award, as well as been inducted into the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences' Hall of Fame.

Mark Cerny joined Atari at the age of 17, and in a career spanning over thirty years has worked variously as a game designer, programmer, producer and business executive. His first major success was the classic arcade game "Marble Madness"; he subsequently made the transition to console games, working for Sega in the U.S. and Japan, and eventually serving as president of Universal Studio's games division. He is now the president and founder of Cerny Games, a game design consultancy that has contributed to the release of no fewer than 14 million-selling titles, including "Ratchet & Clank" and "Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune".

Tonight join Electronic Arts' 20th employee and now Chief Creative Director, Rich Hilleman, for a wide-ranging conversation with Cerny about his life and times in the gaming industry, and his thinking about the state of the industry - from frustratingly difficult games to play to Hollywood's impact on games. Hilleman knows Cerny quite well, so this is certain to be an intelligent, insightful conversation between two industry trailblazers.

This event kicks off a Game Changers track within our Revolutionaries speaker series. Rich Hilleman has agreed to moderate these conversations with gaming industry legends.

This event is part of the Museum's acclaimed Revolutionaries speaker series, featuring renowned innovators, business and technology leaders, and authors in enthralling conversations often with leading journalists. Our audiences learn about the process of innovation, its risks and rewards, and failure that led to ultimate success.

Will the world end in fire … or in ice … or will it end at the hands of our computer overlords?

Join us for a live production of the Big Picture Science podcast and radio show as scientists separate fact from fiction in end-of-world scenarios.

From hoopla over the 2012 doomsday prophesy to asteroid strikes, computer sentience, and climate change, we’ll interview top scientists on stage about the spectacular predictions about the end of the world as well as scientific theories about how it might end.

Be in the audience and watch this national radio show come together - interviews, skits, miscues and all - followed by a discussion with the scientists. This is your chance to ask about the disaster scenario that gives you insomnia and hear just how likely it is to occur.

Doomsday: Be a Part of it … if it’s the Last Thing You Do.


The Computer History Museum is proud to co-host this program on the first day of the 2012 Bay Area Science Festival!

an•thro•pol•o•gy [an-thruh-pol-uh-jee]
The science that deals with the origins, physical and cultural development, biological characteristics, and social customs and beliefs of humankind.

Silos and silo-busting - the secret of innovation
The 21st century world is marked by a profound paradox. On the one hand we are more interconnected than ever before, in the sense that we now live and operate in systems that are tightly entwined. But on the other hand, we also live at a time of great intellectual and social polarization - or silos - and social media is making some of this fracture worse, by encouraging the development of intellectual echo chambers.

The presence of silos inside organizations can often be deadly; the financial industry is a case in point. But groups or people who can "silo bust" - or jump across boundaries and categories - are often extremely innovative; indeed, much of the modern innovation that has occurred in recent years has arisen because of the ability of people to silo bust.

What are the key perils of silos and what do anthropologists have to say about the existence and trap of silos today? How can organizations silo-bust effectively?

Join award-winning journalist (and anthropologist) Gillian Tett and her panel to find the answers to these questions and many more.

This event is part of the Computer History Museum's acclaimed speaker series Revolutionaries, featuring conversations with renowned innovators, business and technology leaders and authors in enthralling and educational conversations about the process of innovation, its risks and rewards, and failure that led to ultimate success.

Doodles are the fun, surprising and sometimes spontaneous changes that are made to the Google logo to celebrate holidays, anniversaries and the lives of famous artists, pioneers and scientists.

In 1998, before the company was even incorporated, the concept of the doodle was born when Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin played with the corporate logo to indicate their attendance at the Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert. Two years later, in 2000, Larry and Sergey asked an intern to produce a doodle for Bastille Day which was so well received by users that a chief doodler was appointed, and doodles started showing up more and more regularly on the Google homepage.

Over time, the demand for doodles has risen in the US and internationally. Creating doodles is now the responsibility of a team of talented illustrators (called doodlers) and engineers. For them, creating doodles has become a group effort to enliven the Google homepage and bring smiles to the faces of Google users around the world.

Tonight we will meet members of the doodle team and get a behind-the-scenes look at their creative process. They will discuss how technology’s evolution has enabled them to create more beautiful and highly interactive doodles, and the challenge that brings to the technical members of the team. We will also find out about possible risks and rewards involved when one’s "canvas" is viewed by millions worldwide.

John Hollar will be our moderator for what is certain to be an entertaining and inspirational evening. Please join us.

This event is part of our continuing Revolutionaries lecture series, featuring conversations with some of the most distinguished thinkers in the computing field.

This event is a part of the ZERO1 Biennial: Seeking Silicon Valley conference. Some of the most brilliant minds in contemporary art, technology, science and architecture come together for one of the world’s only Biennials to focus on the convergence of contemporary art and technology. Opening week includes a nighttime street festival, urban screen, public art, artist talks and more, with Biennial events continuing into December with over 150 artists, 45 partners and a network of exhibitions, performances, public art and programs throughout the Bay Area. For more information visit zero1biennial.org

Imagine what the world would look like if we gave everyone the ability to solve its toughest problems, the freedom to explore the world, and the tools to build the future. These are ideas that have been driving Dan Kaufman and his research efforts at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). He is convinced that if we build the tools and technology to empower everyone to participate, we would be amazed at the results.

Recently at DARPA there have been multiple efforts to research the mobilization and self-organization potential of social networks & crowd sourcing. Two interesting questions arise: can you use the power of the crowd to solve a specific problem, and can you find special people in the crowd to solve a problem who have never been asked before?

The power of the crowd has been explored through DARPA's Network Challenge (commonly referred to as the Red Balloon Challenge) in which 10 large red weather balloons were placed at undisclosed locations across the US for one day.

Finding people in the crowd who can contribute greatly has been explored through a recent DARPA sponsored experiment called the Shredder Challenge. In this test, the winning solution was not resolved by the "power of the crowd," but by finding, in the crowd, those special people who may have never been asked the question. Many thought the task impossible, but it turned out that they had been asking the wrong people.

An obstacle to fully empowering the crowd is the need for software programmers. DARPA has pushed to develop tools that allow ordinary people to solve complex problems. The program RealWorld gave tools to U.S. soldiers to allow them to create their own mission-specific simulations, without expertise in computer programming. Those tools have now been used to build aircraft, medical, and neurological simulators.

John Markoff has referred to DARPA as an "Agency of Wonder" – join us tonight to find out why.

This event is part of our 2012 lecture series celebrating Revolutionaries, featuring conversations with and about some of the most distinguished thinkers in the computing field. The Revolutionaries lecture series complements the launch of the Computer History Museum's permanent exhibition, Revolution: The First 2000 Years of Computing.

History shows that the evolutionary road of a century-old company often leads directly through Silicon Valley. Ford Motor Company, founded in 1903, is now tapping directly into the Valley’s brand of innovation and design with the opening of a new research lab. What is the aim of Ford’s entry into this epicenter of creativity, and how does it fit with Ford’s strategic future?

Bill Ford, executive chairman, has been an outspoken advocate of Ford’s embrace of new technology for both sustainability and mobility. Ford, the great-grandson of the legendary Henry Ford, has focused much of Ford’s strategy on building smarter, connected and technology-centric automobiles that use real-time computing for everything from engine control to network communications.

In February, he was the first global auto executive to deliver a keynote address at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, where he described his vision of the modern automobile as a "mobile platform." Ford sees a world where the car of the future moves through a globally connected communications and transportation grid. He warned of an alternative future of "global gridlock" and also expanded on his view of automobiles made more sustainable through technology.

Bill Ford's vision has been at work for years. For nearly a decade, Ford has been working with technology companies like Microsoft, co-developer of the advanced in-car communication system Ford SYNC, and the MyFord Touch interface. With the promise of vehicle-to-vehicle communications, crowdsourcing and cloud-connected cars, Ford seeks to inaugurate a new age of ubiquitous connectivity. When the car becomes a platform for software developers, what might the future hold?

One hundred years ago, the automobile redefined personal mobility. Over the last decade, innovation in Silicon Valley redefined how we communicate as a society. I am excited to be part of the convergence of Silicon Valley and Detroit to not only further our vehicle technology but also to work toward creating a new, smarter and sustainable transportation ecosystem.
Bill Ford, Executive Chairman, Ford Motor Company


We look forward to welcoming Bill Ford to the Computer History Museum for a conversation with Museum CEO John Hollar about Ford’s dedication to mobility, his lifelong dedication to sustainability, and Ford’s evolution from a car company into a 21st century experience company.

We are very pleased that KQED Radio will be onsite taping this lecture for future broadcast.

This event is part of our 2012 Revolutionaries speaker series, featuring conversations with some of the most distinguished minds in the computer business. The Revolutionaries speaker series complements the opening of the Museum's permanent exhibition, Revolution: The First 2000 Years of Computing.

What we are seeing in the world is the balance of power shifting. The old rules just don’t always apply anymore and a lot of the new rules are being written by people that don’t even know they are writing them.
Sheryl Sandberg, Chief Operating Officer, Facebook
Digital Life Design Conference Keynote
January 24, 2012

Dateline: November 4, 1952: UNIVAC Predicts an Eisenhower Win! Sixty years ago this November, public opinion polls gave the 1952 Presidential election to Adlai Stevenson. UNIVAC, star of CBS’ election coverage (along with a new anchor, Walter Cronkite), predicted an Eisenhower landslide. UNIVAC was right. The computer’s TV debut captivated an audience already enthralled by technology and confronting new tools—and new terminology—almost daily. "UNIVAC" became synonymous with "computer" for a generation of Americans.

Although much has changed since 1952, technology and politics remain closely intertwined. We’ll look at the history of using computing to poll and predict election outcomes, as well as how campaigns have used technology, as the Obama team did in 2008, to win elections. What are the implications of technology-driven campaigns and the electorate’s use of social media on our republic? What are the positives and negatives associated with all of this connectivity?

The panel will also look beyond U.S. borders to discuss the possible ramifications of the Arab Spring and whether other global political shifts may be looming. Easy, global access to social media tools has definitely created a power shift – from institutions to individuals. But what does that shift really mean – what are the larger implications to global stability?

Please join us for compelling discussion led by our moderator, Richard Tedlow, and his distinguished panel. We plan to make use of social media ourselves to capture your questions for the panel in the days leading up to the event.

We are very pleased that KQED Radio will be onsite taping this event for future broadcast. We are also very pleased that C-SPAN will be taping this event and will broadcast as part of their prime time coverage in the coming weeks.

This event is part of our 2012 lecture series celebrating Revolutionaries, featuring conversations with and about some of the most distinguished thinkers in the computing field. The Revolutionaries lecture series complements the launch of the Computer History Museum's permanent exhibition, Revolution: The First 2000 Years of Computing.

I am thinking about something much more important than bombs. I am thinking about computers.
John von Neumann, 1946


The most powerful technology of the last century was not the atomic bomb, but software—and both were invented by the same folks. Even as they were inventing it, the original geniuses imagined almost everything software has become since. At long last, George Dyson delivers the untold story of software’s creation. It is an amazing tale brilliantly deciphered.
Kevin Kelly,
cofounder of WIRED magazine, author of What Technology Wants


Legendary historian George Dyson vividly re-creates the scenes of focused experimentation, incredible mathematical insight, and pure creative genius that gave us computers, digital television, modern genetics, models of stellar evolution—in other words, computer code.


In the 1940s and '50s, a group of eccentric geniuses—led by John von Neumann—gathered at the newly created Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Their joint project was the realization of the theoretical universal machine, an idea that had been put forth by mathematician Alan Turing. This group of brilliant engineers worked in isolation, almost entirely independent from industry and the traditional academic community. But because they relied exclusively on government funding, the government wanted its share of the results: the computer that they built also led directly to the hydrogen bomb. George Dyson has uncovered a wealth of new material about this project, and in bringing the story of these men and women and their ideas to life, he shows how the crucial advancements that dominated twentieth-century technology emerged from one computer in one laboratory, where the digital universe as we know it was born.


Join John Hollar for a captivating conversation with Dyson about John von Neumann and the beginnings of the digital universe.

Send in your questions to George Dyson via Twitter using @computerhistory #TuringsCathedral.


We are pleased to partner with Kepler's on this event - they
will be selling copies of Turing's Cathedral before and after the event.


KQED Radio will be on-site to tape this event for broadcast March 8 at 8pm.

C-SPAN's Book TV will also be on-site to tape this event for future broadcast.

This event is part of our 2012 Revolutionaries series, featuring conversations with some of the most distinguished minds in the computing field.

Revolution: The First 2000 Years of Computing.
Everyone uses computers. Few know the story of how they came to be. Revolution chronicles the evolution and impact of modern computing from the abacus to the smart phone. This 25,000 sq. ft multimedia experience is a technological wonderland that immerses visitors in the sights, sounds, and stories of the computer revolution. Be sure to visit the Birth of the Computer gallery, where you can learn more about early computers and the people involved in creating them.
Visit Revolution online

"Human beings are creatures of habit, so getting ourselves and our teams to think beyond the obvious is a challenge we face all the time. Phil McKinney is an innovation expert, and his killer questions and hit-the-spot anecdotes provide a great way to get out in front of opportunities we otherwise won't see."
--Geoffrey A. Moore,Author of Crossing the Chasm and Escape Velocity

Generating and executing great ideas is the key to staying ahead in a rapidly changing world. It seems so basic. Why is it so hard to actually get right? According to innovation expert Phil McKinney, the real problem is that we’re teaching people to ask the wrong questions about their businesses—or none at all. There has to be a better way.

In Beyond the Obvious, McKinney discusses his proven FIRE (Focus, Ideation, Rank, Execution) Method to dig deeper and get back to asking the right questions—the ones all companies must ask to survive. Full of real-world examples, this book will change the way you operate, innovate, and create, and it all begins with battle-tested questions Phil has gathered on note cards throughout his career. Shared for the first time here, these "Killer Questions" include:
• What are the rules and assumptions my industry operates under? What if the opposite were true?
• What will be the buying criteria used by my customer in 5 years?
• What are my unshakable beliefs about what my customers want?
• Who uses my product in ways I never anticipated?

Join innovation expert Phil McKinney for a conversation with the Computer History Museum's John Hollar about killer questions and some of the ways we can all learn to harness the power of innovation.

Our partner Kepler’s Books will be on-site selling copies of Beyond the Obvious before and after the event.

In an historic event in February 2011, IBM’s Watson computer competed on Jeopardy! against the TV quiz show’s two biggest all-time champions. Watson is a computer running software called Deep QA, developed by IBM Research. While the grand challenge driving the project was to win on Jeopardy!, the broader goal of Watson was to create a new generation of technology that can find answers in unstructured data more effectively than standard search technology.


Computer systems that can directly and accurately answer peoples' questions over a broad domain of human knowledge have been envisioned by scientists and writers since the advent of computers themselves. Open domain question answering holds tremendous promise for facilitating informed decision making over vast volumes of natural language content. Applications in business intelligence, healthcare, customer support, enterprise knowledge management, social computing, science and government could all benefit from computer systems capable of deeper language understanding. The DeepQA project is aimed at exploring how advancing and integrating Natural Language Processing (NLP), Information Retrieval (IR), Machine Learning (ML), Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR&R) and massively parallel computation can greatly advance the science and application of automatic Question Answering.


Dr. Ferrucci is an IBM Fellow and Watson Principal Investigator for IBM Research. Richard Waters is the West Coast Editor for the Financial Times. Join them for a fascinating exploration of how the Watson project began, its ancestry, the epic Jeopardy! win, and the ways Watson technology can improve human decision-making.


And, after the conversation has ended, let the games begin! We will play host to another round of Jeopardy! – featuring another pair of humans brave enough to take on Watson. They are Ms. Stacey Higginbotham and Dr. Robert Walker. IBM Research's Dr. Eric Brown will be the game's host. Please join us!


This event is part of our 2011 lecture series celebrating Revolutionaries, featuring conversations with and about some of the most distinguished thinkers in the computing field. The Revolutionaries lecture series complements the launch of the Computer History Museum’s permanent exhibition, Revolution: The First 2000 Years of Computing.

Join leading researchers Dr. Eric Horvitz of Microsoft Research and Dr. Peter Norvig of Google for an intriguing discussion about the past, present, and future of artificial intelligence, moderated by KQED's Tim Olson. We are extremely fortunate to have Eric and Peter on our stage – they've known each other for several years, and can discuss everything from machine learning to data-driven science, the world of perception, speech recognition, robotics, self-driving cars, and even a computer called Watson. A Wonder Dialog indeed!

Make sure you leave time before or after this event to visit the Museum's new exhibition, Revolution: The First 2000 Years of Computing. Among Revolutions 19 galleries, you will find one devoted to the history of Artificial Intelligence & Robotics, with its featured icon, Shakey the Robot.

We are proud to partner with the Bay Area Science Festival on this Wonder Dialog. This event is also part of the Museum’s Revolutionaries 2011 lecture series, featuring conversations with some of the most distinguished thinkers in the technology industry. We are very pleased that KQED Radio will tape this event, and will broadcast and live stream it on Wednesday, November 30 at 8p.m.

The world around us is a symphony of vibrations. From temperature, light, sound and a host of other physical quantities, we live in a world of continuously varying signals. Capturing these signals and making them do amazing things is the domain of the analog circuit designer.

Join us for a special night on October 15 as we feature a panel discussion on the world of analog systems and one of its biggest stars, Jim Williams.

Williams was a remarkable man: an engineer who was self-taught yet set the bar for the entire technical community. Artist, scientist, mentor and teacher, come celebrate and reflect upon this man’s influence and on the world of analog systems around us with five distinguished guests:

- Co-founder and CTO of Linear Technology , Bob Dobkin,
- Founder and CTO, Bam Labs Inc, Steve Young,
- Vice President, Power Management Products, Linear Technology, Steve Pietkiewicz,
- Professor, Stanford University, Department of Electrical Engineering, Greg Kovacs.
- Museum President & CEO, John Hollar will moderate the conversation.

On the same day, the Museum also opens its new exhibit: “An Analog Life: Remembering Jim Williams,” featuring Jim Williams’s famous analog workbench. We hope you can join us Oct 15 to see the exhibit and attend the panel.

Proponents of software patents argue that software deserves the protection of patents just as any other invention does. Critics of software patents argue that they stifle innovation rather than promote it by cutting off the free flow of ideas needed to advance technology.

THE MOTION: SOFTWARE PATENTS ENCOURAGE INNOVATION
Proponents of software patents argue that software deserves the protection of patents just as any other invention does. Software is simply a description of computer instructions that allow a processor to perform complex tasks. Particularly in today's knowledge economy, the value of software is growing and patents protect the investment of time, effort, and money made by companies and individual programmers.

Critics of software patents argue that they stifle innovation rather than promote it by cutting off the free flow of ideas needed to advance technology. Software consists of mathematical equations, which cannot and should not be patentable. Most software patents describe algorithms that are simple or obvious to a programmer of ordinary skill and thus do not deserve patent protection.



FOR THE MOTION
Bob Zeidman is the president and founder of Zeidman Consulting, a premiere contract research and development firm in Silicon Valley that focuses on engineering consulting to law firms about intellectual property disputes. Clients have included Apple Computer, Cisco Systems, Cadence Design Systems, Facebook, Intel, Symantec, Texas Instruments, and Zynga. Bob is also the president and founder of Software Analysis and Forensic Engineering Corporation, the leading provider of software intellectual property analysis tools. Bob has worked on and testified in nearly 100 cases involving billions of dollars in disputed intellectual property.


Bob is a prolific writer and instructor, giving seminars at conferences around the world. Among his publications are numerous articles on engineering and business as well as four textbooks, two novels, and three screenplays. Bob holds numerous patents and earned two bachelor's degrees, in physics and electrical engineering, from Cornell University and a master's degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University.



AGAINST THE MOTION
Edward A. Lee has been on the faculty in the Electrical Engineering
and Computer Sciences (EECS) department at U.C. Berkeley for more than 25 years. He has served as chair of the department and currently holds the Robert S. Pepper Distinguished Professorship. He has been a proponent of open source software and has headed the design and development of an open source design environment known as Ptolemy. He is a co-founder of BDTI, Inc., a technical analysis and advising company, where he is currently a Senior Technical Ad visor, has consulted for a number of other companies, and has served as an expert witness and/or advisor in software patent litigation cases. His research interests center on design, modeling, and analysis of embedded, real-time computational systems. He is a director of Chess, the Berkeley Center for Hybrid and Embedded Software Systems. He has published extensively, including six books and hundreds of research papers. Prior to Berkeley, Prof. Lee was a member of technical staff at Bell Telephone Laboratories in Holmdel, New Jersey, in the Advanced Data Communications Laboratory. His bachelors degree (B.S.) is from Yale University (1979), his masters (S.M.) from MIT (1981), and his Ph.D. from U. C. Berkeley (1986). He is a Fellow of the IEEE, was an NSF Presidential Young Investigator, and won the 1997 Frederick Emmons Terman Award for Engineering Education.



MODERATOR
John C. Hollar, President and Chief Executive Officer, Computer History Museum. He has served as CEO since 2008, and holds bachelor's degrees in political science and journalism (BFA), and in law (JD) from Harvard Law School.



AUDIENCE PARTICIPATION
The audience will serve as jurors. NOTE
Bob Zeidman will be signing copies of his most recent book, The Software IP Detective Handbook, after today's debate. The book will be made available for purchase in the Museum store.

About the Film. SOMETHING VENTURED tells the story of the creation of an industry that went on to become the single greatest engine of innovation and economic growth in the 20th century. It is told by the visionary risk-takers who dared to make it happen...Tom Perkins, Don Valentine, Arthur Rock, Dick Kramlich and others. The film also includes some of our finest entrepreneurs sharing how they worked with these venture capitalists to grow world-class companies like Intel, Apple, Cisco, Atari, Genentech, Tandem and others.

Beginning in the late 1950's, this small group of high rollers fostered a one-of-a-kind business culture that encouraged extraordinary risk and made possible unprecedented rewards. They laid the groundwork for America's start-up economy, providing not just the working capital but the guidance to allow seedling companies to reach their full potential. Our lives would be dramatically different without the contributions that these venture capitalists made to the creation of PCs, the Internet and life-saving drugs.

Directed by Emmy-Award-winning filmmakers Dan Geller and Dayna Goldfine, SOMETHING VENTURED is executive produced by Paul Holland, a general partner with Foundation Capital, and Molly Davis, a founding partner of Rainmaker Communications.

SOMETHING VENTURED will also screen during the Palo Alto Film Festival, September 29 through October 2, 2011. PAIFF: Redefining Film in a Digital Age. PAIFF is a four-day festival celebrating the new forms of storytelling in film and media that have developed as a result of technological innovation. The inaugural festival showcases 20 features, 25 shorts and 30 talks, panels and workshops.

This screening is part of our 2011 lecture series celebrating Revolutionaries, featuring conversations with and about some of the most distinguished thinkers in the computing field. The Revolutionaries lecture series complements the launch of the Computer History Museum's permanent exhibition, Revolution: The First 2000 Years of Computing.

Sir Maurice Wilkes, without doubt one of the foremost pioneers of computing, died in November last year aged 97. In a remarkably long and distinguished career, he built the EDSAC the world's first electronic stored-program computer to go into regular service, and went on to pioneer concepts such a microprogramming, bit-sliced architectures, local area networks and many many other things. He served the international computing community with distinction and gained many honours.

David Hartley has spent almost the whole of his career in Cambridge University much of it in close association with Sir Maurice. In conversation with CHM’s John Hollar, David will describe Sir Maurice's more important achievements, including the EDSAC computer, as well as giving a personal view of a man that he knew and with whom he worked over such a long period of time.


This event is part of our 2011 lecture series celebrating Revolutionaries, featuring conversations with and about some of the most distinguished thinkers in the computing field. The Revolutionaries lecture series complements the launch of the Computer History Museum’s permanent exhibition, Revolution: The First 2000 Years of Computing.

In 2007 and 2008, Time named Paul Allen one of the hundred most influential people in the world. His impact has been felt in science, technology, business, medicine, sports, music, and philanthropy. His passion, curiosity, and intellectual rigor - combined with the resources to launch and support new initiatives - have literally changed the world.

In 2009 Allen discovered that he had lymphoma, lending urgency to his desire to share his story for the first time. In this long-awaited memoir, Allen explains how he has solved problems, what he's learned from his many endeavors--both the triumphs and the failures--and his compelling vision for the future. He reflects candidly on an extraordinary life. The book also features previously untold stories about everything from the true origins of Microsoft to Allen's role in the dawn of private space travel (with SpaceShipOne) and in discoveries at the frontiers of brain science.

Paul Allen co-founded Microsoft with Bill Gates. He is the chairman of Vulcan Inc. and founder of the Allen Institute for Brain Science. He also owns the Seattle Seahawks and the Portland Trail Blazers and is co-owner of the Seattle Sounders pro soccer team.

Join us for a fascinating glimpse into Paul Allen’s life and work, with the award-winning multimedia journalist, Jose Antonio Vargas.

This event is part of our 2011 lecture series celebrating Revolutionaries, featuring conversations with and about some of the most distinguished thinkers in the computing field. The Revolutionaries lecture series complements the launch of the Computer History Museum’s permanent exhibition, Revolution: The First 2000 Years of Computing. This event is brought to you by Kepler’s and the Computer History Museum.

We’re going to see games tackling women’s rights. We’re going to see games around climate change. We’re going to see games around medical innovation that doctors are going to play.- Jane McGonigal


In 1988, when Jane McGonigal was 10, she started gaming for fun on a Commodore 64 computer. Twenty-two years and one Berkeley Ph.D later, she still thinks games are fun. But as director of game research and development at the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto, she also thinks they can save the world. In fact, her first book, Reality is Broken, predicts a game designer will win the Nobel Peace Prize. (From O Magazine’s 2010 Power List)

Why, McGonigal asks, should we use the power of games for escapist entertainment alone? Her research suggests that gamers are expert problem solvers and collaborators, because they cooperate with other players to overcome daunting virtual challenges, and she helped pioneer a fast-growing genre of games that aim to turn gameplay to socially positive ends.

In Reality is Broken, she reveals how these new Alternate Reality Games are already improving the quality of our daily lives, fighting social problems like depression and obesity and addressing vital twenty-first century challenges – and she forecasts the thrilling possibilities that lie ahead. She introduces us to games like World Without Oil, a simulation designed to brainstorm – and therefore avert – the challenges of a worldwide oil shortage, and Evoke, a game commissioned by the World Bank Institute that sends players on missions to address issues from poverty to climate change.

Join NPR’s Laura Sydell for what is certain to be a fascinating and provocative conversation with visionary Jane McGonigal. They’ll discuss the ways in which we might harness the power of games to solve real world problems and boost global happiness. Revolutionary thinking for certain!

This event is part of our 2011 lecture series celebrating Revolutionaries, featuring conversations with and about some of the most distinguished thinkers in the computing field. The Revolutionaries lecture series complements the launch of the Computer History Museum’s permanent exhibition: Revolution: The First 2000 Years of Computing. Keplers Books will be on location to sell copies of Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World.

Please Join us for the 40th Anniversary Celebration of the SPICE (Simulation Program with Integrated Circuit Emphasis), circuit simulator. SPICE was born as a class project at UC Berkeley and first released in 1971. You will get to witness a roundtable discussion of those responsible for the creation and world-wide propagation of this invaluable and universally used software program. Topics will include the origins, evolution, and future of SPICE, and its seminal role as early open-source software. For ISSCC Attendees 4:30 p.m. Coach Service will depart from San Francisco Marriott (Optional)*- Fee $20
Deadline to sign up for the Coach Service is February 16th.

One night in the late 1930s, in a bar on the Illinois-Iowa border, John Vincent Atanasoff, a professor of physics at Iowa State University, after a frustrating day performing tedious mathematical calculations in his lab, hit on the idea that the binary number system and electronic switches, combined with an array of capacitors on a moving drum to serve as memory, could yield a computing machine that would make his life and the lives of other similarly burdened scientists easier. Then he went back and built the machine. It worked. The whole world changed.

Why don't we know the name of John Atanasoff as well as we know those of Alan Turing and John von Neumann? Atanasoff never secured a patent for his early device, and a number of the concepts he pioneered were incorporated into the breakthrough ENIAC computer that evolved into the legendary UNIVAC. But in 1973 a court declared that the patent on that Sperry Rand device was invalid, opening the intellectual property gates to the computer revolution.

Join Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Jane Smiley in a conversation with the Computer History Museum's John Hollar about the fascinating man who beat the world's greatest minds in the quest to develop the first true digital computing machine.

This event is the first in our 2011 lecture series celebrating Revolutionaries, featuring conversations with and about some of the most distinguished thinkers in the computing field. The Revolutionaries lecture series complements the launch of the Computer History Museum's permanent exhibition: Revolution: The First 2000 Years of Computing. Gordon Bell will introduce the program, which will feature selected footage from John Atanasoff's 1980 appearance at the Computer Museum in Boston.

Kepler's Books will be on location selling copies of The Man Who Invented the Computer.

The growth and impact of Facebook is mind blowing, even for an industry that considers “overnight success” to be a long-range goal. Founded in a Harvard dorm room on February 4th 2004 by 19-year-old Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook now has almost 500 million active users. Most are outside of the United States. Half of them log on every day.

Facebook has already made an irreversible impact on society, marketing and politics – even driving protest around the world including in countries such as Colombia and Iran. Facebook is also changing our sense of identity: “I am on Facebook; therefore I am.”

Longtime Fortune technology writer David Kirkpatrick chronicles the rise of Facebook in one of the most anticipated books of 2010: The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting The World. Kirkpatrick gained the full cooperation of Zuckerberg and his team. The Facebook Effect is the first historically authoritative account of how a simple idea became the dominant way to communicate on the Internet.

As part of its Net@40 series, the Computer History Museum is proud to present an evening of fascinating dialogue between Kirkpatrick and Zuckerberg on the past and future of Facebook. The moderator will be Guy Raz, the Peabody award-winning host of NPR’s All Things Considered. The Net@40 Program is in partnership with National Public Radio.

The MOS (metal-oxide-semiconductor) transistor, the fundamental building block of digital electronics, is the base technology of late 20th and early 21st century. The story of its development is one of the key chapters in the history of the semiconductor and computing industries. After being the subject of extensive research and vigorous activity among semiconductor pioneers at companies like Fairchild, IBM, RCA, Bell Labs, TI and Intel throughout the 1960s, the MOS transistor first achieved major usage in the 1970’s with DRAMs and microprocessors. When it became the industry standard in the 1980s, the door to the Digital Age was thrown wide open. As a result, tens of thousands of MOS enabled digital products have made their way into offices and homes worldwide, irrevocably changing the human experience.

Join us for a discussion of the often-difficult path to mainstream acceptance of the MOS transistor and its lasting impact on computing and communications. Technology historian, Dr. Ross Bassett, will chair a conversation with three early MOS champions and semiconductor pioneers---David Hodges, Bell Labs and UC Berkeley; Dr. Lewis Terman, IBM and 2008 IEEE president; and Les Vadasz, Fairchild and Intel. Dr. Bassett authored the definitive book on the topic, “To the Digital Age, Research Labs, Start-up Companies, and the Rise of MOS Technology” from John Hopkins University Press.

Perhaps the greatest untold story in the history of computing is the development of the PLATO system at the University of Illinois and later also at Control Data Corporation. Largely unknown today to the general public, PLATO's list of innovations and seminal influences is considerable. For the first time ever, this event will assemble many of the key people involved with the creation of the PLATO phenomenon.

This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to meet and learn from an amazing variety of technology innovators, including Don Bitzer, creator of PLATO and co-inventor of the flat-panel gas plasma display, Microsoft's Ray Ozzie (who got his start on PLATO at the University of Illinois), and many others.

As part of the Net@40 year-long celebration at the Museum, Bob Taylor and NPR’s Guy Raz will share a stage to discuss the origins of the personal computer revolution and computer networking.

Bob Taylor planned to be a Methodist minister, like his father. He ended up an evangelist for an idea that changed the world: easy-to-use computers that talk to each other. “I was never interested in the computer as a mathematical device, but as a communication device,” Taylor said. Taylor’s interests – and his genius for getting them funded – helped develop computer networking, the personal computer, and many of the other technologies that drove the global computer revolution.

As director of ARPA’s Information Processing Techniques office, Taylor funded Doug Engelbart, inventor of the mouse and co-inventor of many of the aspects of computing we take for granted today, from clickable links to multiple windows. Taylor then hired networking pioneer Larry Roberts to oversee the ARPAnet project – the first major experiment in general computer networking, and a key ancestor of the Internet. As founder of the Xerox PARC Computer Systems Laboratory, Taylor went on to recruit and manage the hot-tempered brigade of geniuses who developed the set of features so familiar on our Mac and Windows machines today, including the graphical user interface, Ethernet and laser printing. He also oversaw important work in connecting networks to each other.

Taylor will talk about the process of fostering innovation and share stories of how radical ideas evolve in a discussion with Guy Raz, the weekend host of NPR’s All Things Considered.

According to Beyer, Grace Hopper is arguably as important a figure to computing as Bill Gates, Larry Ellison and Steve Jobs, and serves as a responsible, civic-oriented role model for current and future technical and business leaders.

A Hollywood movie about the life of computer pioneer Grace Murray Hopper (1906-1992) would go like this: a young professor abandons the ivy-covered walls of academia to serve her country in the Navy after Pearl Harbor and finds herself on the front lines of the computer revolution. She works hard to succeed in the all-male computer industry, is almost brought down by personal problems but survives them, and ends her career as a celebrated elder stateswoman of computing, a heroine to thousands, hailed as the inventor of computer programming. Throughout Hopper’s later years, the popular media told this simplified version of her life story.

In Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age, Kurt Beyer goes beyond the screen play-ready myth to reveal a more authentic Hopper, a vibrant and complex woman whose career paralleled the meteoric trajectory of the postwar computer industry, and discusses the indelible contribution she made to the nascent computer industry.

Hopper made herself “one of the boys” in Howard Aiken’s wartime Computation Laboratory at Harvard, then moved on to the Eckert and Mauchly Computer Corporation. She was influential in male-dominated military and business organizations at a time when women were encouraged to devote themselves to housework and childbearing. Hopper’s greatest technical achievement was to create the tools that would allow humans to communicate with computers in terms other than ones and zeroes. This advance influenced all future programming and software design and laid the foundation for the development of user-friendly personal computers.

March is Women’s History Month and the Computer History Museum is proud to showcase the career and accomplishments of a genuine innovator, Grace Hopper. Among her many awards, Grace Hopper was the Computer History Museum’s first Fellow award recipient for her development of programming languages, computer instruction, and her lifelong naval service. The complete list of her awards and degrees exceeds two full pages, including the National Medal of Technology and 37 honorary doctoral degrees.

She is most definitely a role model – but not just for women. Author Kurt Beyer, who met Hopper while he was a student at the U.S. Naval Academy, says she influenced his own career choices – first as a naval officer, then as an academic, and finally as an entrepreneur.

Don’t miss what is certain to be a lively and inspiring discussion, moderated by Northern California Public Broadcasting’s Chief Content Officer Linda O’Bryon.

Hewlett-Packard – HP – surprisingly to many, is the largest high-tech company on the globe, with its roots and headquarters in Silicon Valley. HP is some 20% larger than IBM today, and no other company is close to half the size of this 0B company. However, HP has not garnered the same attention from computer historians and the media as given to companies like IBM, DEC and Apple. Why? Certainly, having no recent “big name” leader, a la Gates, Jobs or Ellison, and no “big name inventor” a la Bell, Noyce or Moore, and “no blockbuster product” a la Windows, iPod, or the IBM PC hasn’t helped. So, what is it that drove the success of this large and profitable company?

The HP Phenomenon describes how it came to be that HP – never a computing company really – got to this leadership position – in PCs, in printers, in mid-range servers, in GUI designs, in handheld calculators, and even in disc drives, not to mention microcomputer chips, communication chips, and LED display chips. Maybe more importantly, it describes a very different kind of company, one where serendipity and multiple lines of investigation and inquiry lead to very defensible competitive positions against seemingly more focused, more aggressive and more innovative companies. It even explains the unusual symbiosis between Intel, the Japanese memory manufacturers and HP chip and computer system designers that has never been told before – a story in itself that reworked an entire industry as well as competitors.

Author Chuck House is the only person in the history of HP to win the company’s Award for Meritorious Defiance. KQED's Dave Iverson will moderate a discussion with House on HP's ethos, its spirit of innovation and the complex matter of product and business strategies that drove the Company’s success. He will give us an insider’s view of a HP, whose history and evolution is really the history and evolution, he believes of the Silicon Valley.

Please join us for a special celebration of the 50th anniversary of the announcement of the IBM 1401 Data Processing System, the world's most popular computer during most of the 1960s. Activities will include presentations by the original 1401 chief architect, program manager and marketing lead, followed by a Q&A panel session.

We'll also acknowledge the successful restoration of two 48-year-old IBM 1401 magnetic-tape systems by a team of volunteers. The event at the Museum is being hosted by Jon Iwata, IBM's SVP of Marketing and Communications.

Announced in 1959, the IBM 1401 was widely adopted by business and institutions around the world. By the mid 1960s, half of all computers were 1401s or members of its family. The 1401 was one of IBM’s earliest transistorized computers and introduced thousands of businesses to stored-program computing while its tape and disk systems freed them from the decades-long practice of storing data on punched cards.

Known as a “small-scale computer, a 1401 system weighted 2-to-4 tons, dissipated 12,000 watts, and was built out of over half a million parts. In today's dollars, a typical system rented for $ 45,000 a month or was purchasable for $ 3.4 million. The 1401's popularity was due in part to its legendary peripherals, including its chain-based 1403 printer whose fast speed and outstanding print quality made it into an industry workhorse.

Speakers and Panelists:
- Jon Iwata, IBM Senior VP, Marketing & Communications
- Francis Underwood, IBM 1401 Chief Architect, 1957 - 1960
- Charles Branscomb, IBM 1401 Program Manager, 1957 - 1960
- Sheldon Jacobs, IBM 1401 Marketing Lead, 1958 - 1960
- Robert Garner, IBM 1401 Restoration Project Lead, Computer History Museum, 2004 - 2010

America’s future rests on the shoulders of our next generation. At a time when our teens lag far behind other countries in math and science, Whiz Kids is a coming-of-age documentary that tells the story of three remarkably different yet equally passionate 17-year-old scientists who vie to compete in the nation’s oldest, most prestigious science competition: Intel Science Talent Search, which was formerly sponsored by Westinghouse.

Win or lose, these ‘whiz kids’ raise questions about class, courage, personal sacrifice, success and failure and in the process, learn as much about themselves as they do about science. From the filmmakers who brought you the Sundance and Emmy Award-winning films Scout's Honor and Girls Like Us comes the new feature length documentary Whiz Kids.

Spitfire Ana Cisneros is a first generation Ecuadorian American whose parents came to the U.S. in search of a better life for their family. The daughter of a former DuPont chemist from West Virginia, Kelydra Welcker is an earnest environmental watchdog. Pakistani-born Harmain Khan is a mercurial teen with enormous ambition.

While the competition itself provides a grueling and emotionally compelling narrative, the filmmakers agreed that the coming of age stories of its contenders would comprise the heart of the film. For a year and a half, they visited high schools around the country searching for teenagers who were engaged in sophisticated research. The team found students, who at 16 and 17, were already working in university and government labs, sometimes alongside Nobel Prize winning scientists. They also found students with fewer resources who were making discoveries in the apocryphal basement or garage lab. Several traits were consistent among these ‘whiz kids’—an insatiable curiosity, a deeply felt determination to communicate their work to the public and a passion to make a difference in the world.



The film-makers included:
- Director and Co-producer Tom Shepard, a teen scientist and a Science Talent Search finalist in 1987;
- Co-directer and co-producer Tina DiFeliciantonio;
- Editor, Writer and Sound-recordist Jane C. Wagner;
- Producer Michael Duca.

Interested in becoming a Whiz Kid?
The deadline for the 2010 Intel Science Talent Search is November 18,2009. For rules, entry form and more information, please visit: http://scisery.org/sts/

Books have always played a central role in the evolution and propagation of human culture and knowledge. The topic of digitizing books, in particular, is of special interest to the Computer History Museum's community: On March 1, a standing-room crowd in Hahn Auditorium heard a fascinating discussion on Information Technology and the Future of Books, Publishing, and Libraries in partnership with the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Now CHM takes another step in its exploration of this field by devoting an evening to the discussion of Google's ambitious effort to digitize the world's books.

Join Daniel Clancy, Engineering Director of Google Books, as he discusses Google's historic project to provide greater access to books online. Clancy will talk firsthand about the fundamentals of digitizing books, the recent settlement agreement between Google, authors and publishers, and the implications he sees for the business, publishing and academic communities (see Background below).

Our second speaker, John Hollar, CEO of the Computer History Museum, is a former senior executive in the publishing industry. He will draw upon his rich experience in books and online media to examine with Clancy what the Google Books agreement means for users' ability to access content online, and to inform the audience about the substance (or possibly lack thereof) in the public discussion and discourse on the subject.

Background
In October 2008, Google and a broad class of authors and publishers announced an agreement to settle the lawsuits brought against Google Books. The lawsuits alleged copyright violation for scanning pages of copyrighted works for purposes of indexing and providing snippets.

If approved by the court, the agreement offers unprecedented opportunities for users to access the wealth of information found in books. Google's view, and that of many scholars, readers, librarians, and book creators, is that the agreement opens the door to greater information for users, as well as greater competition and innovation in the digital print market.

Some have been making the case that the agreement will give Google an unfair edge in selling books, in particular the so-called orphan and out-of-print books. In October 2009, the court will hold a hearing to consider objections and determine whether the settlement is to be approved.

Please join us as the Computer History Museum presents history in the making to examine this groundbreaking agreement and its many implications for digital print and the public at large. Please note that this event will also include an extensive Q&A session with attendees.

Join Gary Reback, author of the new book Free the Market! in conversation with Michael Arrington of TechCrunch to discuss how the Obama Administration’s antitrust enforcement policies will affect Silicon Valley’s economy.

Drawing on vivid, behind-the-scenes accounts of leading high tech lawsuits – involving top companies like Apple, Microsoft, IBM, Oracle and AT&T – Reback’s new book paints a tableau of government policy gone awry. “You can read his account as eyewitness history, a memoir of legal warfare,” wrote Scott Herhold in the San Jose Mercury News. “Free the Market! is a white paper meant to influence a new government in Washington D.C.”

Reback and Arrington will examine President Obama’s commitment to innovation along with his promise of renewed antitrust enforcement to make predictions about how the new administration will answer important questions.

- Should antitrust enforcers stop worrying about Microsoft?
- When will the Justice Department sue Google?
- Is industry consolidation good for the Valley? Is it legal?
- Will the government challenge the assertions of patents by giant patent pools?
- What does antitrust say about companies that are “too big to fail”?

Having been ranked #1 on FORTUNE magazine 2009 “Best Companies to Work For” List, NetApp makes for a great case study for Silicon Valley tech companies. Join us when Dave Hitz, co-founder and executive vice president at NetApp, shares his insights on growing a company from 3 to over 8,000 people and the major business cycle NetApp had to go through to get there —from the jack-of-all-trades mentality of a start-up, to the tumultuous period of the dot-com boom and bust, and finally to a mature enterprise company. He'll also share stories and anecdotes from his new book: How to Castrate a Bull: Unexpected Lessons on Risk, Growth, and Success in Business.

Dave Hitz and James Lau founded NetApp in 1992, with a desire to simplify storage the way Cisco simplified networking. Hitz and Lau believed that general-purpose computing systems were too complex, so they built dedicated devices called appliances. These appliances were designed to handle one thing well: data storage.

Prior to 1992, Hitz worked as a senior engineer at Auspex Corporation, an enterprise storage solutions provider, where he was responsible for file systems and microkernel design. He also held engineering positions at MIPS Computer, focusing on file system and I/O subsystem design for the System V kernel development effort. Before his career in the computer industry, Hitz worked as a cowboy, gaining valuable management experience by herding, branding, and castrating cattle.

Hitz holds a bachelor's degree in computer science and electrical engineering from Princeton University.

As the basic building block of digital electronics, the integrated circuit -- the "chip" -- has profoundly transformed societies across the globe. Reflecting this impact, Isaac Asimov once described the innovation of the integrated circuit as “the most important moment since man emerged as a life form.”

The late 1950s and early 1960s was an extraordinary period of development in semiconductor electronics. Military interest in, and the semiconductor industry’s pursuit of diverse approaches to microcircuitry took off in the second half of the 1950s. 1959 saw a burst of intellectual activity across the industry as Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments, along with Jean Hoerni and Robert Noyce of Fairchild Semiconductor, and others, filed patent applications that held keys to the development of the modern integrated circuit. Jay Last’s team at Fairchild, which would create the first planar integrated circuits, also began their efforts in 1959.

The Computer History Museum is partnering with the Chemical Heritage Foundation and the IEEE Santa Clara Valley Section to celebrate the 50th anniversary of these transformative developments. Major funding for Salute to the Semiconductor is generously provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and the Intel Corporation. Additional funding for the IC@50 events is provided by the National Semiconductor Foundation, a charitable fund at the Silicon Valley Community Foundation.

The Revolution is Over. The computer has won. It occupies a place in every aspect of our lives. Yet, we know little about the revolutionaries, the people who changed the world with computing technology.

Too Soon to Tell, David Alan Grier's newest book, tries to capture the lives of the people who developed computing technology and help us understand the sacrifices they made, the decisions they faced and the world they left behind. It is a book of essays, that explores the human landscape that welcomed the computer in the 1946, and guided its development over sixty years. These essays are built around a collection of unforgettable characters who help explain the nature of the computer age. These characters include the unstoppable Ro who, uncovered the obscene operating system; Bohannon, the fast talking computer marketeer; Mark, the programmer who was trying to make a living in Armenia; and, of course, Grier's father, who shepherded a community of computer users.

Grier, long-time columnist for Computer magazine, will join us for evening at the Computer History Museum to talk about the human side of the computer industry and the many individuals who helped build that industry. It will be an evening of insights and stories, as he talks about the essays in Too Soon to Tell. He will talk about the fascinating relationships that have worked in this industry and will explore that powerful relationship that has connected people and machines and institutions in the brief span of time that has marked the computer age.

Bob Metcalfe was awarded a 2008 Fellow Award by the Computer History Museum for leading the invention, standardization, and commercialization of the Ethernet local-area networking system for PCs.

With a solid history of technology pioneering work under his belt, Metcalfe is currently a partner at Polaris Ventures. He has had three careers in technological innovation before becoming a venture capitalist, working with the next generation of innovators and emerging technologies.

• As an engineer-scientist (1965-1979), Metcalfe helped pioneer the Internet. In 1973, at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, he invented Ethernet, the local-area networking (LAN) standard on which he shares four patents. Now, 35 years later, about 350 million new Ethernet ports are shipped annually.

• As an entrepreneur-executive (1979-1990), he founded 3Com Corporation, the billion-dollar networking company where at various times he was Chairman, CEO, division general manager, and vice president of engineering, sales, and marketing.

• As a publisher-pundit (1990-2000), Metcalfe was CEO of IDG's InfoWorld Publishing Company (1992-1995). For eight years, he opined about the Internet in an InfoWorld column read weekly by half a million information technologists.

Metcalfe will sit down with Cisco Senior Vice President Kathy Hill to discuss his experiences in the technology industry, life lessons and current passions. He has been very active in finding a solution for the world’s energy challenge and identifying the innovations (and innovators) who will meet that challenge. Join the CHM community as we celebrate the work of this remarkable individual.

Under the leadership of Andy Grove and Gordon Moore, the personal computer market changed in October 1985 with the launch of the Intel 80386. Today, no one will dispute that Intel is a world-leading company, but few recall that Intel’s path to its position as technology giant was solidified by way of an unprecedented business strategy. Join Harvard Business School Professor and CHM Board Member Richard S. Tedlow as he reviews the sole-source supplier business strategy with the CHM audience.

Learn how Intel forever changed the landscape of the computing industry with its decision in the mid-1980s to act as the sole source for its revolutionary 386 microprocessor. Prior to this risky and unorthodox move, companies would “second-source” products by licensing their technology to competitors – the way it was always done. The 386 marked the end of second-sourcing and the beginning of Intel’s leadership as a components-supplier in the personal computer market. But why was this significant and what did it mean to the future of the microprocessor and the future of personal computers?

Professor Tedlow will present the business case, as taught in his Harvard Business School classes, to describe how these important decisions were made and what valuable lessons we can learn from Intel’s industry-changing business choices.

While Silicon Valley is responsible for the wealth of millions of people, not many are familiar with its long and complex history. Unbeknownst to even the most seasoned inhabitant or observer, Silicon Valley, Northern California’s peninsula, was shaped by many forces.

Join renowned serial entrepreneur, Steve Blank, as he provides an overview on the secret history of Silicon Valley and how the Valley got its start. Much like the startups that have made Silicon Valley famous, the Valley began in a strikingly similar formula.

Hear the story of how two major events – WWII and the Cold War – and one Stanford professor set the stage for the creation and explosive growth of entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley. In true startup form, the world was forever changed when the CIA and the National Security Agency acted as venture capitalists for this first wave of entrepreneurship. Learn about the key players and the series of events that contributed to this dramatic and important piece of the emergence of this world renowned technology mecca.

Sam Wyly: From $1,000 and an Idea to Billionaire

Sam Wyly may be one of the most successful entrepreneurs you’ve never heard of. Despite his below-the-radar approach, he is one of those rare serial success stories who has launched and led best-of-breed companies in a wide range of industries including technology, energy, retail, and investments:

- With an idea for the first computer utility and $1,000 in savings, Wyly founded University Computing. Two years later, he took the company public and made his first million.
- Launched software companies Sterling Software and Sterling Commerce which were sold for $8 billion.
- Co-founded Maverick Capital in 1990. At the end of 2006, the company had over $9 billion in assets.
- Grew the modest Bonanza Steakhouse chain to 600 restaurants by 1989 when Wyly sold the chain.
- Expanded Michaels, a small arts-and-crafts company, into more than 900 stores. The chain was sold to private equity firms in 2006 for $6 billion.
- Created Green Mountain Energy, arguably the most profitable green energy business in America.

Sitting down with noted Valley VC Dixon Doll, Wyly will talk about the vision, creative processes, challenges, and relationships that have taken him on the road to his extraordinary success. He will speak honestly, as he does in his recent memoir, 1,000 Dollars and an Idea: Entrepreneur to Billionaire, of both the wins and the losses as well as the lessons learned throughout his career: Failure is crucial to achieving success, independent thought is imperative, luck serendipitous and power useless unless it is wielded for good. Wyly and Doll will also discuss: What does it take to be successful in today’s marketplace? What traits are critical for cross-industry success? What mistakes does he see many entrepreneurs making?

You won’t want to miss this rare opportunity to hear from Sam Wyly, who Walter Isaacson, CEO of the Aspen Institute calls, "a wonderful American character, a natural entrepreneur, businessman and philanthropist with an outsized personality and humor to match his success." Please note: This event is only open to the Computer History Museum's members and Churchill Club's community.

Since 1987, the Computer History Museum Fellow Awards annually honors distinguished technology leaders who have forever changed the world with their accomplishments. This prestigious award distinguishes the Fellows’ role in the advancement of computing history, as well as the impact of their contributions: They have truly bettered our lives and our society.

The Computer History Museum is proud to have a part in highlighting and preserving these esteemed technology heroes’ stories for future generations.

The 2008 Fellow Awards honorees:
- Jean Bartik was one of the first programmers of the groundbreaking ENIAC computing system in 1945. She later assisted in converting the ENIAC system into one of the first stored-program computers.
- Bob Metcalfe led the invention, standardization, and commercialization of Ethernet.
- Linus Torvalds created the Linux kernel and oversaw open source development of the widely used Linux operating system.

Professor Tedlow will discuss the story of IBM as the leading technology company in the 1960s taking a huge risk in developing a new family of computers – a financial investment approximately three times its annual sales (1960). In 1966, Fortune magazine called this “perhaps the riskiest business judgment” of the era.

In 1964, IBM held press conferences in 62 US cities and 14 countries around the world, where Thomas Watson, Jr., the Chairman of the Board, and CEO announced that the new System/360 was “a sharp departure from the concepts of the past.” There were to be six separate compatible machines, with interchangeable memories, providing 19 different combinations, and a total of 40 peripherals. No other company had ever introduced six computer models of totally new design, at one time, in a technology never tested in the marketplace, and with programming abilities of the greatest complexity.

Join Professor Richard S. Tedlow, as he facilitates an interactive discussion, which analyzes this very high risk, very high reward business decision. With history as the teacher, Tedlow will ask probing questions as he leads the debate on such issues as:
- Why would a company that’s leading the market attempt a project of such immense financial and technological risk?
- What were the key success factors for the IBM 360? What was the “secret sauce” in the company culture that allowed its people to succeed with this startling innovation?
- Why was it possible for a non-technical CEO, like Watson to manage such a technologically complex project? Would this be possible in today’s technological climate?
- What can Google learn from this lesson? Microsoft?
- What can other great companies learn about change and innovation from this business decision?

Join the Computer History Museum in launching its exciting new exhibit: Babbage’s Difference Engine No. 2, exhibited for the first time in North America. Bring your family and friends to see and hear the Engine in action!

This five-ton Engine is one of only two Charles Babbage’s computing engines ever built, consisting of 8,000 parts of bronze, cast iron and steel and measuring 11 feet long and 7 feet high. It was designed to calculate and print mathematical tables. Come to see the docents “crank” the Engine and watch it mechanically calculate - an arresting spectacle of automatic computing.

The exhibit launch and open house, a Victorian-themed event, promises a stunning display of Babbage’s elegant design and inspired engineering. His designs for vast mechanical calculating engines rank as one of the startling achievements of the 19th century.

The Babbage Exhibit is made possible through the generosity of the following donors: Nathan Myhrvold, Andreas Bechtolsheim, Bell Family Trust, Donna Dubinsky & Len Shustek, Judy Estrin, Fry’s Electronics - Kathryn Kolder, Dorrit & F. Grant Saviers, Marva & John Warnock, and special thanks to Science Museum, London.

Come to see what no Victorian ever saw.

Almost 50 years ago, many countries competed in technology innovation – specifically, The Race to the Moon was a competition between the Soviets and Americans that the entire world watched. As the Cold War diminished, technology competition lessened and an era of cooperation materialized, and as early as 1975, scientific cooperation between the US and the Soviet Union was launched with the first cooperative human space flight.

From the competitive to cooperative – Now, the age of space exploration has advanced to a point where private citizens can travel to space. Using proven equipment and working side-by-side with professional astronauts and cosmonauts from a variety of countries, this new era is defining “outer space” as a new tourist destination.

Between April 7 and April 21, 2007, Dr. Charles Simonyi successfully completed his 14-day mission to the International Space Station. Convinced that humans will one day travel and live in space, Dr. Simonyi traveled with the hope of advancing civilian space flight, assisting space station research, and involving the world’s youth in the science of space travel.

A major internet milestone occured on November 22, 1977. On this date the first known three-network transmission took place among SRI International, Menlo Park and the University of Southern California via London, England. The networks involved were the ARPANET, the Bay Area packet radio network, and the Atlantic packet satellite network.

This inter-network transmission among three dissimlar networks is generally regarded as the first true Internet connection. It was also a major milestone in packet radio, the technology behind WiFi and other kinds of wireless internet access.

On November 7, 2007, the Computer History Musuem and co-host the Web History Center will present a special celebration of this historic demonstration that spawned the Internet we know and use today.

Please join us for a panel presentiion with recollections and perspectives from Vint Cerf, Robert Kahn, Don Nielson and other key pioneers and luminaries involved.

The SRI van from which the packet radio transmission occured will be open for tours from 5:30-7 pm.

Apple Computer has long been noted for its industrial design prowess and ability to generate public interest with each new offering. Don't miss this unique opportunity to hear fascinating personal stories and perspectives of what it was like to be an industrial designer at Apple. Meet Jerry Manock, designer of the Apple II, Apple III and the original Mac, and Robert Brunner, head of Apple’s newly-formed Industrial Design Group (IDg) in 1990 that produced the PowerBook, Color Classic, and LC 520. Moderated by noted industrial designer and IDEO co-founder Bill Moggridge.

The evening will include a photograph exhibit and book-signing of Core Memory: A Visual Survey of Vintage Computers Featuring Machines from the Computer History Museum with photographer Mark Richards and author John Alderman, published by Chronicle Books.

BACKGROUND
The Computer History Museum Presents Speaker Series is an exclusive platform for open, passionate discussions for presenting the computing revolution and its impact on the human experience. These landmark presentations and panel discussions present inside stories and personal insights of top information age leaders from industry, government and academia, and assist the Museum in bringing computing history to life.

A 1951 graduate of Harvard Business School, Arthur Rock began his career as a security analyst in New York City before joining the corporate finance department of Hayden, Stone & Co. In 1957 he worked with Alfred “Bud” Coyle to raise financing from Sherman Fairchild to found Fairchild Semiconductor, the company that established Silicon Valley as a world center of innovation in integrated circuit technology.

Mr. Rock moved to California in 1961 and formed a partnership with Tommy Davis. Together they invested $3 million and returned $100 million to their investors. After establishing his own firm, Arthur Rock & Co in 1968, he worked with Fairchild co-founders Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce to launch Intel Corporation, the largest, and by many measures, the most successful semiconductor company in the world today. He notes that “It was one of the few times that I helped start a company that I absolutely knew in my own mind was going to be a big success. I raised the money just on the telephone in something like two days.”

Arthur Rock served as Intel’s first Chairman of the Board and Chairman of the Executive Committee. Based on this experience he has proclaimed Rock’s Law, a corollary to Moore’s Law, which says that “the cost of capital equipment to build semiconductors will double every four years.”

Mr. Rock also invested in and held early stage board positions at pioneering scientific computing company, Scientific Data Systems; at Teledyne, which grew into one of the most successful technology conglomerates in the history of American business, and at Apple Computer. He has contributed to the local community by supporting the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Opera, and the California Institute of Technology. In 2003 he donated $25 Million to establish the Arthur Rock Center for Entrepreneurship at Harvard Business School. Professor of Business Administration Howard H. Stevenson says “Arthur Rock is part of the history of American business and entrepreneurship.

Computing is no longer a science of the artificial. It is a science of natural information processes. The remarkable shift to this realization occurred only in the last decade.

Computing is mature enough to be described in terms of its fundamental principles. The principles reveal computing's deep structure and how it applies in many fields. They reveal common aspects of technology and create opportunities for innovation. They open entirely new ways to stimulate the excitement and curiosity of young people about the world of computing.

In the 1940s, computation was seen as a tool for solving equations, cracking codes, analyzing data, and managing business processes. By the 1980s, computation had advanced to become a new method in science, joining the traditional theory and experiment. During the 1990s, computation advanced even further as people in many fields discovered they were dealing with information processes buried in their deep structures -- for example, quantum waves in physics, DNA in biology, brain patterns in cognitive science, information flows in economic systems. Computation has entered everyday life with new ways to solve problems, new forms of art, music, motion pictures, and commerce, new approaches to learning, and even new slang expressions.

Peter Denning will share his work on the great principles of computing. His taxonomy will help you understand
computing and how it works in your world. You will see what makes computing great and of lasting value.

In 1936, Alan Turing wrote that computation is unavoidable. He was right.

Join SRI International President and CEO Dr. Curtis Carlson and a panel of SRI luminaries moderated by Paul Saffo.

An event to honor the inventions, inventors, historical milestones and the future of Public-Key Cryptography.

An evening to chronicle 50 years of hard disk drive innovation and its impact on the fabric of society

"Bob Price is the best person I know to tell the story of Control Data and to share its valuable lessons for posterity"
Founder, Control Data Corporation

Control Data's story is one of innovation harnessing the imagination, ingenuity and energy of its people to meet the technology needs of customers and the urgent needs of society. As chairman of the board and CEO, Robert Price was one of Control Data's veteran leaders who effectively blended business strategies with technological innovation.

Control Data's dream of becoming a supercomputer pioneer was born in 1957 during IBM's domination of the industry and at the peak of the Cold War. Yet, this startup computer company was so effective that in 1963, IBM's chairman said that he failed to understand why IBM had lost their leadership position with supercomputers to a company with 34 people, including the janitor.

Despite the turbulence in the social, political and economic environments of the late 1950s and 1960s, Control Data achieved a greatness few companies ever realize. It transformed those 34 employees into a company with 45,000 people around the world with revenues topping one billion dollars in less than 14 years from its start.

Join Robert Price as he shares behind-the-scenes history and personal stories about Control Data's legacy of lasting lessons on innovation.

There will be a book signing for Price's new book, The Eye for Innovation: Recognizing Possibilities and Managing the Creative Enterprise.

As head of research at IBM in the 70s and at Hewlett Packard in the 80s, Joel Birnbaum played a seminal role in helping to conceive and lay the technical groundwork for pervasive computing; computing seamlessly incorporated into everyday life.

One of the prime sites for pervasive computing is the city: its buildings, its transportation systems, its services, and, of course, its residents.

Birnbaum will screen excerpts from some scarcely seen scenario videos about what might be termed the interactive city, based on pervasive computing, and discuss the four stages technology must pass through before it can be considered pervasive.

Steve Dietz is Director of the inaugural, biennial ZeroOne San Jose: A Global Festival of Art on the Edge, which will take place in San Jose August 7-13. One of the themes of the Festival is the “interactive city,” inspired to a great extent by Birnbaum¹s work. Dietz will discuss some of the 36 projects that will be presented on the streets of San Jose during the Festival.

Ben Hooker, a participating artist from London, will also present his project, DataNature, which was jointly commissioned by ZeroOne San Jose and the City of San Jose's Public Art program.

Join wiki inventor Ward Cunningham and Sun Microsystems' chief researcher and vice president of the Science Office, John Gage, for a thoughtful and spirited discussion about the socialization of creativity and the past, present and future views of models to support this trend.

On February 13, 1956, co-inventor of the transistor William Shockley formally announced the establishment of Shockley Labs, Silicon Valley’s first semiconductor company. In their modest Quonset hut laboratory on San Antonio Avenue in Mountain View, Shockley’s hand-picked team of some of the nation’s brightest young scientists and engineers developed innovative technologies and ideas that forever changed the way we live, work and play. To celebrate the 50th anniversary of this pivotal event in the history of our region, join technology historian Michael Riordan in a conversation between early Shockley employees and associates Jim Gibbons, Jay Last, Hans Queisser, and Harry Sello.

Mike Ruettgers is retired chairman of the board and special advisor to EMC Corporation, the world leader in products, services and solutions for information management and storage. A frequent speaker at influential venues around the world, including the World Economic Forum and major IT industry conferences, Ruettgers joined EMC in 1988 and served as CEO from 1992 until 2001. Ruettgers has been named one of the World's Top 25 Executives by BusinessWeek; one of the Best CEOs in America by Worth magazine; one of the 25 Most Powerful People in Networking in 2000 by Network World; and CEO of the Year for 2000 by Massachusetts Investor's Digest. Please join us as this extraordinary leader and visionary shares personal stories from his multi-decade odyssey in the high-tech industry.

Author and BioCentury Publications Senior Editor Steve Usdin tells the fascinating story of two American engineers, Joel Barr and Alfred Sarant, who were recruited into espionage by Julius Rosenberg, and, driven by ideology, evaded the FBI and escaped to carry on their work on behalf of the Soviet state. Barr and Sarant rose to the pinnacle of power in the Soviet establishment and managed the building of the postwar modern Soviet military machine and microelectronics industry. Based on new files and a personal friendship with the late Barr, who gave Usdin interviews and letters revealing his entire life story, Usdin shares new stories on computing during the Cold War and how Zelenograd, the Soviet Silicon Valley came to be.

Usdin is joined by Alexander Galitsky, former Soviet Space Agency president and general manager, to discuss other aspects of how the high tech industry began in the former Soviet Union and how it continues to evolve today.

I find fun and research inexorably intertwined. Research is fun! Like a team sport, the hunt for new knowledge brings purpose, comradeship, conversation, competition, and appreciation. Finding new knowledge brings the joys of novelty, beauty, simplicity, understanding, and sometimes even utility. Just as team spirit wins games, so team spirit speeds research. Team spirit lets us risk exposing our half-baked fledgling ideas so others can carry them further; team spirit lets ideas reverberate between people, growing better with each passs.

Remembering that research is fun offers strategies for both researchers and managers. One who seeks to do good research must play in a field he likes, with trusted colleagues and friends. Seek what you like to do in a place you like and with people you like and respect.

One who seeks to manage research must, like a good coach, create something more than the sum of the players. Good research management seeks the reverberation of ideas that produces results. Good research management builds pride in the environment, pride in the support and understanding researchers feel, and pride in the team. Remember that research is a human endeavor fraught with technical and emotional risks and frustrations. Reduce drudgery, stamp out frustration, encourage spirit, provide support, and recognize achievement to get both loyalty and results.

Please join us for the Computer History Museum’s ongoing “Odysseys in Technology” series featuring Carol Bartz, Chairman, CEO, and President of Autodesk, Inc. in conversation with veteran Silicon Valley author and journalist Michael Malone.

In this wide-ranging exchange, Bartz and Malone will discuss her journey from a small farm town in Wisconsin to the pinnacle of success in high-tech, and the challenges of being a woman executive. This will be a lively evening. Carol is known as a dynamic, entertaining straight-talker with a real passion for life.

Bartz was previously interviewed by Malone for his PBS series, “The Entrepreneurs.”

Playing chess by computer began in the early 1950s, nearly as soon as computers became available. As a human activity, chess is believed to require ‘thinking,’ yet in 1997 a massively-parallel supercomputer, drawing on over four decades of continual advances in both hardware and software, defeated the best human player in the world.

Does playing chess require thinking? Or is human thinking perhaps a form of calculation, parts of which a computer can mimic? What is the tradeoff between ‘knowledge’ and ‘search?’ Was Claude Shannon’s 1950 prediction that studying computer chess might lead to applications in other areas fulfilled?

This panel, comprising seminal contributors to the solution of this challenge—including two of AI’s leading pioneers—will discuss these and other questions as well as the origin and development of computer chess and what it tells us about ourselves and the machines we build.

What did it mean to be a human computer? Who were the first ones? Before Palm Pilots and iPods, PCs and laptops, the term “computer” referred to people who did scientific calculations by hand. In his book When Computers Were Human, David Alan Grier, editor of IEEE Annals of History of Computing, offers the first in-depth account of these workers, who were neither calculating geniuses nor idiot savants but knowledgeable people who, in other circumstances, might have become scientists in their own right. Beginning with the return of Halley's Comet in 1758 and the effort of three French astronomers to compute its orbit to the UNIVAC electronic computer projecting its 1986 orbit, Grier traces “human computers” through the ages. Come join Grier, along with former “computers,” for this look into a little-known slice of high tech history.

Proceeds of the book sale benefit the Computer History Museum.

In this talk, Morton will describe how the Linux kernel actually comes to be, how features are chosen, and how the develop/test/release cycle is managed. He'll explain how commercial Linux distributions such as Red Hat and SuSE fit into this process. More generally, he'll consider what motivates kernel developers, and why system software is a particularly good fit for the open source model.

Reid Dennis, founder of Institutional Venture Partners, and Franklin “Pitch” Johnson, founding partner of Asset Management, review their combined 100 years of venture capital experience and observation, from the major mistakes to the spectacular successes. How does venture capital affect innovation? What have we learned? What is really new? Come learn and be entertained by the very personal stories and views of these two legendary venture capitalists.

Computers have revolutionized image media. Richard Lyon, one of the current pioneers of digital cameras, has found that several generations of pioneers in this field have been entangled with the terms “picture element” and “pixel” and that studying the history of the terminology is a fruitful approach to the history of the people and technology. Vladimir Zworykin's television research group at RCA popularized the term “picture element” in the 1930s, while the TV researchers at Bell Labs ignored that term, preferring “image element.” Fred Billingsley and others at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory developed computerized image processing and propagated the term “pixel” in the 1960s, while image processing researchers at Bell Labs ignored that term, preferring “pel.” In the early 1970s, “pixel” was spread through computer image processing publications from NASA, USC, IBM, Stanford, University of Missouri, and other places, eventually coming to be applied to elements of image sensor hardware, such as Lyon's optical mouse in 1980 and digital camera sensors more recently. Many of the people involved in this complex history have provided their personal recollections and documents to help piece the story together, and more such inputs will be solicited from the Computer History Museum audience.

During the 1960's, most data storage systems used with mainframes and minicomputers were the ones specified by individual computer manufacturers. Since those days, the industry has evolved into a worldwide assortment of computer companies offering systems for a large, diverse mix of applications. The impact on the market for computer storage systems has been huge – Immense markets, divergent host system requirements, short product lives for storage products, numerous storage company start-ups, with valiant attempts to achieve storage product standards and reliability.

All of our panel members have participated in the storage industry's efforts to provide continual improvements in data storage products, industry standards, and system reliability. Their leadership has made possible much of the computer industry's movement to more flexible interconnection of storage products and systems, combined with the enhanced reliability of RAID technology, and the ability to quickly utilize the annual improvements in disk and tape products. The panel members will discuss the challenges, achievements and key events in helping storage evolve into a modern industry.

Few of us dispute the importance of providing access to our cultural heritage. Yet we still seem years away from fulfilling the promises of access: opening long-dormant archives, enriching culture and begetting creativity, and turning cultural consumers into producers. What can we do, and what are we now doing, to resolve obstacles to access, whether rooted in financial, legal or quality concerns? Focusing on how we might navigate these obstacles and turn them into opportunities, our panelists will discuss what they have done to provide access to cultural assets, how their mindsets about access have developed, and where they hope cultural access will evolve.

In 1995, Craig Newmark started craigslist which serves as a non-commercial community bulletin board with classifieds and discussion forums. Using a common sense, down-to-earth approach, craigslist strives to make the 'net more personal and authentic, while advocating social responsibility through the promotion of small, non-profit organizations. The philosophical themes of craigslist are:

*We're about people giving each other a break;

*We're about restoring the human voice to the Internet, reversing the corporate voice and over commercialization;

*We're about providing useful, down-to-earth, common-sense function.

As a result of this attitude, Craig is now recognized as one of the true pioneers of online communities.

Computers have revolutionized music-making. Two of the most important pioneers of computer music, Max Mathews and John Chowning, stand at the epicenter of this musical revolution. Research led by Mathews at Bell Laboratories, beginning in the 1950s, created a series of programming languages that are the direct precursors of today's software synthesizers. His many contributions to interactive music systems, algorithmic composition, and psychoacoustics (with Jean-Claude Risset) are equally seminal. Stanford's legendary Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA, pronounced karma) led by Chowning, has long been a hotbed of innovation. After groundbreaking research in sound spatialization, Chowning's invention of frequency modulation (FM) synthesis led to the most successful synthesizer of all time: the Yamaha DX7.

Join Chowning and Mathews in conversation with Curtis Roads, composer and music historian. This will be followed by Chryssie Nanou (pianist) performing, Duet for One Pianist. Piano supplied by Yamaha

Board members of the IEEE's Annals of the History of Computing share how they view the history of computation and what they see for the future. Come loaded with your questions and try to “stump the historians!

The Vintage Computer Festival is an international event that celebrates the history of computing and promotes the preservation of yesterday's computers by offering people a chance to experience the technologies, people and stories that embody the remarkable tale of the computer revolution. Held annually in locations throughout the world, including the main event in Silicon Valley, the Vintage Computer Festival has also produced sister events in Boston, Germany and Italy.

The seventh annual Vintage Computer Festival will be held on
November 6-7 at the Computer History Museum. Admission is $12 per person per day for full access to speakers, the exhibition and the marketplace, or $7.50 per person per day for exhibition and marketplace access only. Kids 17 and under are admitted free of charge, and parking is free.

On October 29, 1969, Professor Leonard Kleinrock supervised the transmission of the first message on the Internet from UCLA. Since this historic connection 35 years ago, nearly half of all Americans have logged on to the Internet and over 20 percent have high-speed broadband access today.

Join us and hear panelists discuss the history of the Internet, including the vision behind its initial design; the growth of corporate networks and the role of the network in today's business environment; the current trend towards convergence of voice and data; and how the Internet has changed consumer behavior.

Panelists
Dr. Leonard Kleinrock, professor of computer science, UCLA
Charles Hoffman, president and CEO, Covad Communications
Charles H. Giancarlo, vice president CTO, Cisco Systems
Geoff Ralston, chief product officer, Yahoo! Inc.

Moderator
Steve Yoder, San Francisco Bureau Chief, The Wall Street Journal.

PLEASE JOIN us to celebrate the accomplishments of five new Computer History Museum Fellows whose creativity, persistence, vision, and worldwide influence in the field of computing have helped reshape our everyday lives.


ERICH BLOCH
For engineering management of the IBM Stretch supercomputer, and of the Solid Logic Technology used in the IBM System/360, which revolutionized the computer industry.


DAN BRICKLIN
For advancing the utility of personal computers by developing the VisiCalc electronic spreadsheet.


BOB EVANS (1927-2004)
For excellence in management of computer systems, hardware, and software development projects, including the IBM System/360, which revolutionized the computer industry.


BOB FRANKSTON
For advancing the utility of personal computers by developing the VisiCalc electronic spreadsheet.


NIKLAUS WIRTH
For seminal work in programming languages and algorithms, including Euler, Algol-W, Pascal, Modula, and Oberon.

It's really easy to equate the breathtaking exponential growth in computing technologies with an underlying innovation in computing architecture. Nothing could be further from the truth. In this unabashedly personal perspective of our living computer history, Greg Papadopoulos distills what has -- and hasn't -- been happening in the design of computers over the past few decades, and uses that to make some predictions as to what the next few will bring. He discusses that, when you boil it all down, there are perhaps only four or five basic ideas in computing; everything else we experience are (just) constant factors.

In January of this year, two golf-cart sized rovers landed on the planet Mars to seek evidence about whether the environment there might once have been capable of supporting life. Originally intended to last 90 days and rover 600 meters, these two Mars Exploration Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, have far exceeded those expectations.

Pete Theisinger, the Manager of the Mars Exploration Rover Project through its development, and now Manager of the 2009 Mars Science Laboratory Project, will describe the challenges of developing the two Mars Exploration Rovers in just three years. He will discuss the design process, relate the myriad challenges and setbacks that had to be overcome during development and operations, and give the definitive behind-the-scenes story of the extraordinary flight and surface operations of the Rover, including some glimpses into the mission's scientific results.

In the not-too-distant future, the majority of electronic devices will be connected via the Internet or wireless protocols, bringing convenience and simplicity to daily living, but adding layers of technology and complexity to devices we use everyday. Jerry Fiddler will offer a glimpse to his vision of the future: "The Connected World." He will discuss how this "world system" will evolve through the convergence of multiple technologies resulting in one, giant interoperable system. The audience will learn that the road to the connected world is wide open, and that today marks the beginning of a new era in the embedded industry.

The program committee and the Computer History Museum invites you and your guest to
Intel Night at the Computer History Museum.

This one-time-only event for current and former Intel executives will feature treasures from Intel's past and a chance to see friends and computers you have known and loved.

You are invited to bring an artifact to share; a coffee cup, a chip, a wine bottle, an ad, a tee shirt, anything to contribute or just to share for the evening.

Program Committee:
• Jack Busch
• Bill Davidow
• Ed Gelbach
• Brian Halla
• Dave House
• Paul Otellini
• Gerry Parker
• David Yoffie
• Albert Yu A non-profit, public benefit organization, the Computer History Museum preserves and presents for posterity the artifacts and stories of the information age and is home to the largest collection of computing atifacts in the world. Dedicated to exploring the social impact of computing, the Museum showcases computing innovators, including business and education leaders, to ensure their legacies live on to teach and inspire others.

This roundtable discussion by the four founders of ROLM Corporation will cover its founding in 1969, the start of a rugged mini-computer business using Data General software, and the introduction of an all-digital, computer-controlled telephone system that successfully competed against the giant Bell System. ROLM was purchased by IBM in 1984. During its 15 years, ROLM made significant contributions to the Silicon Valley Community. In addition to inserting modern technology into an archaic telephone world, ROLM pioneered such employee innovations as the Great Place to Work philosophy, Extended Service Leave, and the hiring and promotion of women in management positions.

Join computer pioneers and National Medal of Technology awardees Erich Bloch, Fred Brooks, Jr. and Bob Evans with current IBM technology chief Nick Donofrio for a conversation about the extraordinary System/360 project.

IBM launched System/360 on April 7, 1964. Many consider it the biggest business gamble of all time. At the height of IBM's success, Thomas J. Watson, Jr. bet the company's future on a new compatible family of computer systems that would help revolutionize modern organizations. Get a behind-the-scenes view of the tough decisions made by some of the people who made them, and learn how the System/360 helped transform the government, science and commercial landscape.

The enterprise software industry is searching for the right words to describe the Next Big Thing -- on demand, utility, autonomic, adaptive enterprise. Pick a buzzword. The goal is information technology that adapts to business requirements, not the other way around. Two technologies are critical to this vision of flexibility: grid computing and web services. The combination of these two technologies is greater than the parts. In fact, it's the Next Big Thing. Now if we can just come up with the right words

It was the autumn of 1983. Business Week magazine had an IBM personal computer on its cover, with the ominous words, And the winner is...IBM.

Apple Computer was in a world of hurt. The Apple II had lost its competitive edge. The Apple III was a sales disappointment and the Lisa, introduced in January 1983, was a financial failure.

Great expectations were being placed on the Macintosh, scheduled to launch on January 24, 1984. Yet there was skepticism both in and outside the company.

There was no hard disk support. The screen was too small and it wasn't in color. There was limited software. And the price was very high -- ,495.

Yet this was indeed the computer for the rest of us. The engineers knew it. The software guys knew it. And Steve Jobs knew it.

The challenge for the Mac Marketing Team was simple: They had to establish and hold a beachhead. Or else they and the product would die.

The introduction of the Macintosh computer launched a comprehensive and integrated approach to high-tech marketing. Much of what was highly innovative in 1984 is now standard fare for all product introductions.

Join us as six key members of the Macintosh launch team tell the inside stories behind one of the most insanely great product launches of all times. There will also be a special Macintosh Computer display set up at 6:00 PM.

Consider the impact auto racing (visibility, technologies) has had on the automotive industry. Computer games have evolved into a similar relationship with the computer industry. Because we get to design the problems that our players face (the game challenges) we have an opportunity to push the boundaries of graphics, user interface, AI, metrics and simulation. What we're currently learning about mapping these abilities to the psychology of our players will be used in the mainstream software of the future.

This talk will look at the design and growth of the World Wide Web, at the weblike connections between people, and toward a future of a web of machine-readable knowledge.

VCF 6.0

The Sixth Annual Vintage Computer Festival will be held on Saturday, October 11th through Sunday, October 12th at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. Some of the amazing events at VCF 6.0 include:

1. Operating Xerox Altos and “D*” machines and superstar Alto panel!
2. Retro-Code Videogame Programming Challenge (3 hrs to design a game!)
3. Over 15 Computer History Lectures!
4. Over 40 amazing computer history exhibits with running hardware!
5. Buy, Sell, Trade at the VCF Marketplace!

Doors open at 9:30am each day. Speakers begin at 10:00am and end at 2:00pm.
The Exhibit and Marketplace open at 2:00pm and end at 6:00pm.

Admission is $10 per person per day for full access to Speakers, the Exhibition and the Marketplace, or $5 per person per day for Exhibition and Marketplace access only. Kids 17 and under are admitted free of charge and parking is free.

For detailed information on the VCF program, please visit: http://www.vintage.org/2003/main/


CHM Book Sale

CHM is also hosting a computer history book sale on VCF opening day. Over 3,000 books from a major figure in the computer industry have been donated to CHM for fundraising in support of the Museum’s educational and preservation missions. The Museum is additionally adding about 350 books surplus to its requirements (mainly duplicates) to the event

If you’re a vintage computer bookworm, you won’t want to miss this sale! Members of the Museum will be admitted at 13:30, 1/2 hour early. For more information about Membership levels and benefits, please visit our website at http://www.computerhistory.org/contribute/individual/ . You may also sign-up on site the day of the sale.

Please come visit us during this spectacular weekend devoted to computer history, become a member, and help support the Museum and its mission to preserve and present the artifacts and stories of the information age.

...and don't forget to reserve your spot at this year's Fellow Awards Ceremony, October 21.

The paper Distributed Computing Economics considers the relative costs of computing resources and the implications this has for distributed system design. Today there is rough price parity between (1) one database access, (2) ten bytes of network traffic, (3) 100,000 instructions, (4) 10 bytes of disk storage, and (5) a megabyte of disk bandwidth. This has implications for how one structures Internet-scale distributed computing: one puts computing as close to the data as possible in order to avoid expensive network traffic. If there is time, the talk will then cover what the architecture we are evolving for the World-Wide Telescope -- a federation of the worlds' astronomy data as a collection of web services accessed via portals.

In January of this year, two golf-cart sized rovers landed on the planet Mars to seek evidence about whether the environment there might once have been capable of supporting life. Originally intended to last 90 days and rover 600 meters, these two Mars Exploration Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, have far exceeded those expectations.

Pete Theisinger, the Manager of the Mars Exploration Rover Project through its development, and now Manager of the 2009 Mars Science Laboratory Project, will describe the challenges of developing the two Mars Exploration Rovers in just three years. He will discuss the design process, relate the myriad challenges and setbacks that had to be overcome during development and operations, and give the definitive behind-the-scenes story of the extraordinary flight and surface operations of the Rover, including some glimpses into the mission's scientific results.

Whenever we pass a variable to a function, or send a message to an object, we're simulating the sending of pulses down a wire. The way that works is the sender and receiver agree in advance on a format that makes the pulses interpretable, also known as a protocol.

Protocols aren't the only way information can travel between places, however. When a physical coffee mug sits on a table, it's possible to imagine that there's a protocol that exists between the two things, but it's an awkward way to think. And yet that's what we often do when we try to build scalable simulations of the world. We can end up with a coffee mug module connected to a table module via a protocol. In the early years of computing, many researchers wished that the world was a little more like a protocol, so that would be easier to interface computers to it.

Early natural language researchers, for instance, were unhappy to find that it wasn't so. What happened instead was that processors eventually became powerful enough to run pattern classification algorithms that could gather information even though the world didn't agree with us in advance on a format. Some examples are face recognition and feature tracking, voice recognition, and scene understanding.

The idea of phenotropics is to use similar pattern recognition techniques to connect software modules together inside the computer. Hopefully systems built in that way will display more informative failure modes, and therefore be more amenable to adaptive improvement. Another potential benefit is that scientific simulations might not be distorted by protocols (as in the example of the coffee mug on the table), and might be more easily integrated into a new iteration of the scientific method in which they could be usefully published, tested, and reused. A potential early application in surgical simulation will be discussed.

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Rare in such a young industry, Judy Estrin is a second-generation computer scientist who has been around computing all of her life. Her parents, Thelma and Gerald Estrin, both PhD's in electrical engineering and IEEE Fellows, worked together when Judy was an infant to build Israel's first mainframe computer, the Weizac, based on the principles developed by John von Neumann.

In graduate school at Stanford in 1975, at age 20, Judy tested TCP/IP protocols as part of Vint Cerf's group, just as the details of the early Internet were being formed. At 24, she became engineering manager at Zilog, with some 20 engineers on her team.

At 26, she co-founded her first company with her husband, Bill Carrico. Eighteen years later, Cisco Systems acquired their third startup, and at age 44, she became chief technology officer of the largest networking equipment company in the world.

Thrice named to Fortune Magazine's list of the 50 most powerful women in American business, Judy is presently CEO of her fourth start-up, Packet Design, formed in May 2000.

Join us as Judy tells the inside story of the people and experiences that have formed her remarkable career.

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Numerous computer researchers and practitioners believe we've come to a wood where two roads diverge: One road calls for us to continue as we have writing unreliable software using inappropriate languages, and debilitating methodologies under the rickety mathematical and engineering metaphors we developed in the 1960s or earlier, and the other begs us to find new metaphors and ways of approaching software to make system building safe, easier, and with respect for our humanity.

IBM's Autonomic Computing, MIT's Amorphous Computing, the Feyerabend Project, the Biological Framings Workshop-all these are looking beyond current theories in ways reminiscent of Kuhn's paradigm shifts and Feyerabend's counterinduction.

In this talk, Gabriel looks at the problems and proposed directions for the way less traveled: biology, physics, and complexity science, for example.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Separately, the work of John Hennessy and David Patterson has yielded direct, major impacts on the computing industry. John started the MIPS RISC project at Stanford, cofounded MIPS Computer Systems, and directed the DASH project. David drove the Berkeley RISC project, led the RAID effort, and participated in the NOW project that led to clustering technology. Together they authored, Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach, considered for over a decade to be essential reading for every serious student and practitioner of computer design. Join us as John Mashey facilitates the discussion of the past, present, and future of computing through the personal stories of these exceptional people.

Leading a publishing revolution...
Adobe's success throughout the years is a result of a unique corporate culture, a balanced focus on the various company constituencies, and the development and promotion of products that were well ahead of the markets they addressed. As Adobe celebrates its 20th anniversary, co-founders John Warnock and Charles Geschke share their remarkable entrepreneurial experience discussing key philosophies and strategies that revolutionized desktop publishing.

Mitch Waldrop brings us the fascinating story of JCR Licklider and The Revolution that Made Computing Personal. Licklider may well have been one of the most influential -- and least known -- people in the history of computer science. As a division director in the Pentagon's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) in the early 1960s, Licklider put in place the funding priorities which led to the Internet and the inventions of the mouse, windows, and hypertext.

The Dream Machine will be available for sale at the lecture and on-line at the Museum's store prior to the event. Every purchase helps to support the preservation of computing history.

Technology Marketing 101: Relationship marketing. One-to-one marketing. The never satisfied consumer... Recognize any of these marketing terms and concepts?

Spend an evening with Regis McKenna, Chairman Emeritus of The McKenna Group, author, and pioneer of many of the theories and practices of technology marketing that have become commonplace today. McKenna, who has worked with many of the most recognizable companies in Silicon Valley and helped launch some of the most important technological innovations of the last 30 years, will discuss early technology marketing efforts.

From their humble beginnings in the 1960s as demonstrations of computer interactivity, to a multi-billion dollar industry, computer video games have become one of the largest forms of entertainment and a major part of popular culture in America, Japan, Europe and beyond. Steven Slug Russell, inventor of the early computer game SpaceWar! and Nolan Bushnell, designer of Computer Space and founder of Atari, share their personal stories from the days when games were played on mainframes through the introduction of the video arcade. Stewart Brand, publisher of the original Whole Earth Catalog and president of The Long Now Foundation, will moderate this discussion about the advent of the modern gaming age.

Doug Engelbart, thinker, inventor, and humanitarian, shares the influences and struggles behind his life of research. Although, he may be best known for his tangible evidence of productivity -- the computer mouse, display editing, outline processing, multiple remote online users of a networked processor, hyperlinking and in-file object processing, multiple windows, hypermedia, context-sensitive help -- his desire has been to maximize his professional contributions toward helping humankind cope with complex and urgent problems. Pierluigi Zappacosta, founder of Logitech and chairman of Digital Persona, probes the visionary mind in this dialogue with Engelbart.

Charlie Sporck examines the genesis and history of the semiconductor industry in California's Silicon Valley. He relays personal stories of his experiences with the people and personalities behind the advancements and setbacks that brought Silicon Valley into being.

01: HAL's Legacy. Meet the film's creator, David Stork, and see a pre-broadcast screening of his 90-minute documentary. This fascinating film moves between clips from 01: A Space Odyssey, leading research labs, and interviews with Arthur C. Clarke, Marvin Minsky, Gordon Moore, Rodney Brooks, Larry Smarr, Daniel Dennett, Raymond Kurzweil , Doug Lenat, and more. These contributors to HAL's Legacy have given us more than a scorecard for the film and novel. They have shown the reasons for the way things developed -- and may continue to develop -- to 2001 and beyond.

The film was produced by the InCA and funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. A shortened version airs nationwide on PBS television Tuesday, November 27 at 11 pm in all US time zone.

What is The Real Virtue in Virtual Reality?

Smalltalk-80, the language from which Squeak is derived, traces its roots to the famous beanbag chair culture of Xerox PARC in the 1970s. Developed by a team headed by Dan Ingalls, Smalltalk was to be the supporting software environment for Alan Kay's visionary portable and networked Dynabook computer -- a concept that remains compelling today. Though the original Dynabook never came into being, Smalltalk took root and continued on. Ingalls tells the story of how the forward-looking Smalltalk concepts and capabilities have evolved into a modern environment called Squeak that could still be... the supporting software environment for the Dynabook.

Mitch Waldrop, brings us the fascinating story of JCR Licklider and "The Revolution that Made Computing Personal. "Licklider may well have been one of the most influential -- and least known -- people in the history of computer science. As a division director in the Pentagon's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), in the early 1960s Licklider put in place the funding priorities which would lead to the Internet, and the invention of the "mouse," "windows," and "hypertext." Book signing and reception follows the lecture.

Thirty years ago, the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center created, over a relatively short period, a paradigm shift in computing. Many of the technologies that make today's personal computers attractive, including high-quality graphical user interfaces, window systems, networked distributed computing, and laser printing, were mature technologies at PARC by the end of the '70s. The platform on which many of these technologies were developed was the Alto personal computer. Although small and slow by today's standards, the Alto's flexibility made it an ideal system for hardware and software experimentation. In this talk, Chuck Thacker and Butler Lampson describe a few of the applications and technologies the Alto enabled, as well as the exceptional working environment at PARC and the extraordinarily talented group of people who made it all happen.

In the summer of 1955, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester, Claude Shannon and John McCarthy proposed a summer workshop on artificial intelligence to be held at Dartmouth in the summer of 1956. It was hoped that the workshop would bring in new ideas and make substantial progress on the AI problem.

In a proposal to the Rockefeller Foundation, the team used what was apparently the first appearance of the phrase "artificial intelligence."

They hoped to prove that every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it. An attempt will be made to find how to make machines use language, form abstractions and concepts, solve kinds of problems now reserved for humans, and improve themselves.

The Denelcor HEP was a uniform shared memory multiprocessor that used fine-grain multithreading to tolerate memory latency, synchronization latency, and even functional unit latency. Six systems were delivered to customers during the years 1981-1985.

This talk will describe the evolution, innovations, and disasters that accompanied the development of hardware and software for the HEP.