Local readers, stop by the second floor of Walter Library on the East Bank of the U of M campus any time to see an exhibit on local computer history installed by Lockheed Martin's Legacy Committee. The exhibit includes the recent article published by the Saint Paul Pioneer Press that I previously blogged about.
Don't forget to come to the opening reception for The Machine That Changed the World this Friday afternoon (January 29) from 4:00-6:00! It will be held in the Andersen Library atrium and you will have a chance to view the exhibit after hours and chat with CBI staff. Light refreshments will be available. Please email me if you have any questions.
An article on the relevance today of Moore's Law and Mooers' Law.
CBI holds the papers of Calvin Mooers - see the finding aid here. Thanks to U of M information literacy librarian Kate Peterson for the story link!
CBI's new exhibit in the Andersen first floor gallery will be opening this coming Monday. Entitled "The Machine That Changed the World: ACM and the History of Computing, 1947-2010," the exhibition chronicles the history of the Association for Computing Machinery and its impact on the computing field. It contains artifacts and materials from the ACM Records and supporting CBI collections. The exhibit is free and will be open to the public from 8:30 to 4:30, Monday through Friday, and 9:00-1:00 on Saturday, and it will be open through March 5. Please come on by! Additionally, there will be an opening reception held on Friday, January 29, from 4:00-6:00 in the Andersen atrium, which will also be open to the public.
Happy New Year, readers. A bit of publicity to start off the year on a good foot: CBI and Director Tom Misa figure prominently in a recent article in the St. Paul Pioneer Press on Engineering Research Associates. The article's author used our ERA Records for background research.
The project to create collection-level finding aids for our entire collection is continuing. Here are three more that were just added to the web:
Barry James Mailloux Collection on ALGOL 68
David Cavanagh Collection on Computer Security
James P. Cordes Collection of Sperry Univac Photographs and Publications
Our Fall 2009 newsletter is now available on our website. We have also added RSS capability to the newsletter: if you use an RSS reader, you can click on the XML link at the bottom of the page, and when we have a new newsletter you will see the articles appear in your feed reader. Please let me know if you have any questions!
Please see CBI's website here and here for announcements for CBI's upcoming awards. The Adelle and Erwin Tomash Graduate Fellowship is given each academic year to a graduate student working on a dissertation in the history of computing. We have also recently begun to award the Arthur L. Norberg Travel Fund, providing two short-term grants for researchers to travel to CBI for use of our archival collections.
A quick interview from CNN on what is possibly the first message transmitted via the Internet, forty years ago on October 29, 1969 (thanks to Minnesota HST student Jonathan for the link!).
I'm trying a new experiment by creating quick, collection-level finding aids for our unprocessed collections so that you have at least a minimal level of access to as many of our collections as possible (eventually, to all of them). Here are links to the first batch - please let me know if you think it's a worthwhile thing to do, or if you'd prefer to remain unaware of those that are unprocessed but have more detailed finding aids for those that are. (Note: some of these have minimal-level box lists, while some have no lists at all.)
Boole & Babbage Users Group Conference Proceedings, 1972-1975 (CBI 137)
Total Information for Educational Systems Records, 1966-1978 (CBI 138)
Charles W. Bradley Collection on the ENIAC Trial, 1930-1966 (CBI 140)
Earl Masterson Papers (CBI 143)
Center for Y2K and Society Records (CBI 155)
Computer Associates International Records, 1982-2001 (CBI 156)
Gordon B. Davis Collection of Photographs, 1966-1976 (CBI 214)
Keith W. Uncapher Papers (CBI 87)
Arthur L. Norberg and William Aspray DARPA Project Research Files, 1960-1989 (CBI 136)
CBI director Tom Misa presented "Organizing the History of Computing: 'Lessons Learned' at the Charles Babbage Institute" at the History of Nordic Computing conference in Turku, two summers ago. It is now published in a Springer conference volume and available electronically at: http://www.springerlink.com/content/978-3-642-03756-6.
CBI associate director Jeff Yost has just published "Manufacturing Mainframes: Component Fabrication and Component Procurement at IBM and Sperry Univac 1960-1975," part of a special issue of History and Technology 25 (Sept. 2009) on 'high tech manufacture'. Jeff's article deals with these two companies' radically differing strategies for securing supplies of semiconductor components, and is based in part on research Jeff did at the Hagley Museum and Library.
If you are in library science or museum studies and interested in computer history, one of these might be for you:
The Computer History Museum in Mountain View , CA is currently accepting applications for internships, including:
* Collections Management Intern, with emphasis on records reconciliation, old loans and a collections move
* Museum Registration Intern, with emphasis on processing new acquisitions and a collections move
* Document Archives Intern, with emphasis on processing text
* Software Archives Intern, with emphasis on processing software of all formats
CHM offers a stipend of $1,000 over 3 months for 12 hours/week worked or $1,500 over 3 months for 18 hours/week worked. Interested individuals must be recent graduates of or currently enrolled as graduate students in either Library and Information Sciences or Museum Studies programs, and applicants must follow application directions as specified in the announcements. Please visit http://www.computerhistory.org/jobs/ for more information.
I am very happy to announce that the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Records have been fully processed and are open for research.
The collection contains the official records of ACM from 1947 through 2007 and documents its administration, operations, projects and its Special Interest Groups (SIGs), which represent virtually every major area of computing.
Please see the finding aid for more details, and feel free to contact CBI with any research requests.