Events and Sightings

Computer History Museum Update

The Computer History Museum is having a banner year. Paid attendance is now well over 125,000 visitors a year, and three times that number of people come to the museum for both sponsored and CHM events. It is difficult not to conclude that the history of computing is becoming mainstream in a way few of us would have thought possible only a decade ago.

Lecture Series

Our day-long lecture series, held on 13 May 2015, on the Antikythera Mechanism—unknown even to most historians of computing until recently—was a sold-out event, with more than 70,000 YouTube views only two weeks later. Speakers presented varying perspectives on the Mechanism: Woods Hole archeologist Brendan Foley discussed his most recent dive to the site of the Antikythera shipwreck; UK scholar Michael Wright brought a functioning replica of the Mechanism, which he demonstrated to a rapt audience; and Tatjana Dzambazova from Autodesk showed new software tools to digitally preserve cultural heritage objects. Watch the event on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSh551cdIEY.

“Computing and Community” was the theme of our 9 June 2015 lecture on the Arduino computing platform, led by Arduino cofounder Massimo Banzi. Again a reflection of computing going mainstream, Arduino is a microcontroller-based computing system, programmed in C and C++, that has been adopted by the millions-strong Maker community as its default method of building systems that sense or control the external environment. Banzi gave an impassioned lecture about the Arduino Project’s goals, its origins, and its later development into an ecosystem equally at home in middle-school classrooms and government laboratories. Watch the Arduino lecture on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d25OnvrRSoE.

A third highly popular lecture at CHM was “Mastering the Pixel: 25 Years of Photoshop.” John and Thomas Knoll, brothers and the creators of Photoshop, described the fortuitous convergence of interests that led to this iconic piece of software: John was working in computer graphics at Industrial Light & Magic and needed computer tools to manipulate images, while Thomas was working on his PhD in computer vision at the University of Michigan. Gradually, the program that became Photoshop emerged through a process of mutual alignment and the brothers found an interested buyer in Adobe. Adobe’s Russell Brown, raconteur and showman of the Photoshop universe, was also on stage (dressed in Elizabethan costume) and spoke of the challenges of moving film photographers to digital technology as well the intense early debates about the ethics of altering images. Watch the lecture here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZS4FQ03XY0.

On 25 April 2015, CHM hosted its annual Fellow Awards. This year’s fellows were Charles Bachman, “for his early work on developing database management systems”; Evelyn Berezin, “for her early work in computer design and a lifetime of entrepreneurial activity”; and Bjarne Stroustrup, “for his invention of the C++ programming language.” We strongly encourage Annals readers to nominate people (or teams) they feel deserve to be recognized. You can watch highlights from the award ceremony at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8Q6xKEUg5Q.

New Exhibits

CHM always has a number of changing temporary exhibits in its main lobby that bring into focus for visitors something remarkable or unusual in the history of computing. Currently, we have a display on “The World’s Smallest Computer,” a complete computing platform the size of a grain of rice developed by researchers at the University of Michigan. Each Michigan Micro Mote, as they are called, is a self-powered computer with a sensor (for temperature, pressure, or imagery) that can form ad hoc networks with any other motes within range. While military interest (and funding) fostered this line of research, there are many peaceful uses for such “smart dust” and visitors enjoy debating the pros and cons of this technology. For more information, see the University of Michigan webpage on the Micro Mote: www.eecs.umich.edu/eecs/about/articles/2015/Worlds-Smallest-Computer-Michigan-Micro-Mote.html.

The museum has a second exhibit in its side lobby on the legendary Honeywell Animals advertising...