CHM Highlights

Steve Jobs: From Garage to World's Most Valuable Company

Steve Jobs was one of our century's greatest innovators whose life mirrors the American Dream itself. How did Jobs start in a suburban garage and build the world's most valuable company? Read More...

An Analog Life: Remembering Jim Williams

In the analog world, Jim Williams was a rock star. His many articles and books encouraged a generation of engineers to pursue intuitive analog design, where experimentation and testing were emphasized over theory and math. Williams was entirely self-taught yet set the bar for the entire technical community. Read More...

Happy 20th Birthday to the public Web!

This month marks 20 years since the Web’s public announcement in several online forums and the release of the WWW code library, libWWW. The library was a kind of "roll your own" tool kit that gave volunteer programmers the pieces they needed to write their own Web browsers and servers. Their efforts-- over half a dozen browsers within 18 months -- saved the poorly-funded Web project and kicked off the Web development community. Read More...

We Had a Dream of Interactive Computing

Legendary computer pioneer, businessman, CHM Fellow and co-founder, Ken Olsen passed away on Sunday Feb 6, 2011 leaving a legacy that touched millions of lives.

Olsen’s computer museum story begins in about 1972 when he and former MIT supervisor Bob Everett began thinking about how to preserve the Whirlwind and TX-0 computers as they were soon becoming available as surplus. Read More...

Why a Computer History Museum?

Humans have been creating tools since before recorded history. For many centuries, most tools served to amplify the power of the human body. We call the period of their greatest flowering the Industrial Revolution. In the last 150 years we have turned to inventing tools that amplify the human mind, and by doing so we are creating the Information Revolution. At its core, of course, is computing. Read More...

MacPaint and QuickDraw Source Code

The Apple Macintosh combined brilliant design in hardware and in software. The drawing program MacPaint, which was released with the computer in January of 1984, was an example of that brilliance both in what it did, and in how it was implemented. For those who want to see how it worked "under the hood", we are pleased, with the permission of Apple Computer, to make available the original program source code of MacPaint and the underlying QuickDraw graphics library. Read More...

October 29, 1969 - Happy 40th Birthday to a Radical Idea!

On the evening of October 29, 1969 the first data travelled between two nodes of the ARPANET, a key ancestor of the Internet. Even more important, this was one of the first big trials of a then-radical idea: Networking computers to each other. The men who symbolically turned the key on the connected world we know today were two young programmers, Charley Kline at UCLA and Bill Duvall at SRI in Northern California, using special equipment made by BBN in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Read More...

Early Apple Business Documents

Apple Computer (now known as Apple, Inc.) was a major force in the personal computer revolution that took place in the 1970s and '80s. Learning about its history teaches us about competing visions of the future and how companies made decisions during this exciting time. The Computer History Museum presents here two special documents from Apple Computer during the early days of personal computing. Read More...