"Who controls the past commands the future. Who commands the future conquers the past."

-George Orwell

This collection of materials relating to the history of computing is provided courtesy of the Department of Computer Science at Virginia Tech, and is sponsored in part by a grant from the National Science Foundation (CDA-9312611).

This site has been chosen by "Edu-Activ", an educational resource site based in Germany.
For other awards click here.

	COMPUTING'S HIGHEST HONOR AWARDED TO INVENTORS OF DOMINANT PROGRAMMING STYLE New York, February 5, 2002...The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) has presented the 2001 A.M. Turing Award, considered the "Nobel Prize of Computing," to Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard of Norway for their role in the invention of object-oriented programming, the most widely used programming model today. See The History of Simula.	Software Design and Management (Germany) Conference 2001 was on the Pioneers of Software. Held in Bonn on 28 and 29 June 2001, the program was filled with the "stars" of programming languages, software engineering, and structured programming. Their web site is a gemstone of videos and graphics worth visiting!
	A new addition to our site is the "take-off" on the ABC show "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?" in a history quiz. Try your knowledge of the history of computing here.

INDEX

Introduction
News
Conferences and meetings
Courses
Overviews of the History of Computing
People and Pioneers
Companies and Corporations
Machines (including a special section on Cryptography)
Programming Languages
Calculators
Computer History Organizations and Museums
Computing at Institutions
Archives and Collections
Publications
Networks and Internet
On-line emulators of computers and computing systems
Miscellaneous
Women in (the) Computing History

INTRODUCTION

This WWW page is the initiation of a collection of materials related to the history of computing as collected and written by J. A. N. Lee, until 1995 Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, past chair of the IEEE Computer Society History of Computing Committee and current chair of the IFIP Working Group 9.7 (History of Computing). It was original constructed as part of the course materials for the "Professionalism in Computing" class at Virginia Tech, and in particular as a set of notes and amplification of the materials in the video "The Machine That Changed The World", developed and distributed by WGBH (PBS) and the British Broadcasting Company (BBC). We are hoping to expand the coverage of the video by providing stills for each of the topics in the notes. The best way to access items on this page is through your browser's find/search facility. An alternative video series is "The Triumph of the Nerds" that chronicles the development of the PC, starting in the mid-1970s. Information about the series is available from PBS and summaries are posted as part of a course on M.I.S. Organizations and Technology at Northern Illinois University.

A collection of materials intended to describe the history of computing to those interested in the 50th Anniversary of Computing in 1996 was used by students at Virginia Tech to develop a Virtual Museum of Computing that you may find very interesting.

This list includes several pointers to lists which we have not been able to verify fully. We are VERY aware that some of these lists contain errors of both fact and date and thus recommend that persons who use them recognize that they are foremost secondary, if not tertiary sources, and thus should be independently verified.

The materials included here are intended to assist scholars and students in their work, but the use of the materials for other publications (other than links from other pages) requires you to get the appropriate copyright clearance. If you wish to use these materials please send me e-mail

During the Fall semester 1996 and Spring Semester 1997, several students have chosen to partially fulfill the requirements of our "Professionalism" class by adding additional background material in support of the video "The Machine That Changed The World" notes. When you find their work, it would be nice if you would drop them a note to appreciate their work. If there are other classes that have had a similar assignment and would like to contribute their materials please let me have a URL as soon as possible. Ultimately I would like to download the material to this site to help preserve the information since student sites tend to disappear frequently. Thus please put a copyright notice on the page, and a note that permission has been granted to transfer it to Virginia Tech.

Your comments, thoughts, and possibly contributions, should be sent to me J.A.N. Lee. Links to other pages are particularly welcome. Several contributors have suggested that I add thumbnails for the portraits and figures. Regrettably this page has grown so large that it takes a long time for people to download. If I get time, I will try to separate the page into separate pages for each of the topics in the index and then add thumbnails. Enjoy the page.

Throughout 1996 I wrote a monthly column for IEEE Computer entitled "looking.back". While each of the columns was edited for length (and occasionally for content) and the figures removed, the original submissions are now available, and should be relevent for many years to come!

CONFERENCES AND MEETINGS

Vintage Computer Festival

If you know of a meeting that needs to be advertised send me an e-mail message.

INTERESTING ITEMS (Without enough companions to make a category)

The Origin of the word Daemon

A preliminary posting of a bibliography on on-line character recognition (a.k.a. dynamic character recognition, a.k.a. pen computing) by Jean Renard Ward. History of Computing Curriculum - a proposal.
Picture of the original bug (now in the Smithsonian Institute) Bug
An interesting story of the QWERTY keyboard, its origins and myths.
A Computer in a Buddhist Temple -- a press release photograph from the WGBH press kit related to Video Series
Questions and Answers from the 1994 ACM/Computer Museum Computer Bowl ComputerBowl
For a Trivia Quiz relating to the History of Computing -Click here!
The computer was named the Machine of the Year in 1982 by Time Magazine. The rationale for this selection has been extracted from the Time Inc. pages.
The Machine That Changed The World -- notes on the WGBH/PBS Television Series TMTCTW; Notes were recently added for episodes 4 and 5, courtesy of Osman Balci (Virginia Tech) and links to "side bars" for the first three episodes were expanded. If you can add links to other places of interest that would help students get an expanded understanding of the topics in this video series, send me e-mail.
Talking Machines -- a press release photograph from the WGBH press kit related to Video Series
A special page by Amdahl Corporation commemorates the 25th Anniversary of Unix and includes several links to historic information: http://www.amdahl.com/internet/events/unix25.html
Humor is a dangerous thing when one is dealing with history since it often distorts the facts and creates myths that outlive the facts. This set of quotations has circulated around newsgroups long enough that it is becoming part of history itself! Accept with a grain of salt.

switch on [email protected]
Women in (the) Computing History

In keeping with the tradition of documenting women's history through oral histories, the Women in (the) Computing History mailing list hopes to augment traditional resources of women's history and histories of computing by being a repository for women's own stories throughout the history of computing. All women in computing, too, not just those of us formally schooled in the computing sciences.

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