Human-computer interaction has a longer lineage than most timelines acknowledge... Archives of IT's report traces 75 years of UK contributions to how people actually work with machines.

Archives of IT@archivesofit.bsky.social · 2d ago

👩‍💻 Three years ago we published our research into the history of Human-Computer Interaction. An in-depth report, funded by the Worshipful Company of Information Technologists' Charity, examined the contribution UK pioneers have made over the past 75 years. Read more: archivesit.org.uk/human-comput...

A nice detail from Bernd Ulmann's demo: the little car on the oscilloscope begins as a circle, and a function generator bends it into shape. Nudge the generator and it stretches into any form, drawn from continuous signals rather than pixels. #AnalogComputing #ComputingHistory

Incredible how technologies sometimes start in one place and end up being used completely differently…

IEEE Spectrum@spectrum.ieee.org · 4d ago

The story of the Magnetophon captures how engineering choices can rewrite cultural norms about what sounds “real.”

Back when a game using 256k was considered a big number.

Video Game History Foundation@gamehistoryorg.bsky.social · 6d ago

When prepping some 'blind box' magazines to send out, we spotted this fun ad for 1991's Gradius: Interstellar Assault for Game Boy. And look how the box cover gets boast-y about the cartridge size. (2 megabits, a whopping 256k!)

It's so cool that @archive.org is keeping FLASH alive.

Internet Archive@archive.org · 6d ago

🌈 2010. 🎶 Erasure's Always plays as you mash Z, chasing that high score 🏆 and your best sparkly unicorn life 🦄 ROBOT UNICORN ATTACK still runs thanks to preservation & emulation via Ruffle. Flash is gone 👋, but your favorite games don't have to be. 🌐 Play it now! archive.org/details/robo...

The Computer History Museum is hiring a curator — worth a look for anyone in our field who wants a hand in how this history gets told. Please pass it along! bsky.app/profile/dcbr...

David C. Brock@dcbrock.bsky.social · last wk.

Open curator position at the Computer History Museum. computerhistory.org/jobs/curator/

Through the 1950s the world built around 6,000 vacuum-tube computers in total. Today there are roughly 23 billion processors on Earth. David Alan Grier, former IEEE Computer Society president, credits transistors and large-scale integration for the leap. #AnalogComputing #ComputingHistory

New to Bluesky and love the history of computing? We've gathered the museums, archives, historians, and restorers who keep IT history alive into one starter pack — follow the whole field in a single tap 👇 bsky.app/starter-pack...

🎂 Happy 138th Birthday to Vladimir Zworykin, born July 29, 1888! His iconoscope and kinescope formed one of the first complete electronic television systems. The cathode ray tube behind them went on to light up oscilloscopes, radar screens, and computer monitors. ithistory.org/honoree/vlad...

Before pixels, people made pictures from letters and punctuation on teletypes, line printers, and green-screen terminals. (Yes, that's the Enterprise, in ASCII.) What's the first ASCII art you remember? Reply and tell us. #ITHistory #ComputingHistory #ASCIIArt

Clive England of cray-history.net, in front of vintage Cray machines: from the Cray-1 onward the arithmetic was 64-bit, a wide enough spread to avoid overflow and keep precision, reaching toward the effectively infinite range an analog computer has by nature. #AnalogComputing #ComputingHistory

Just had a great conversation with Gopal Kapur, longtime Trustee of IT History Society, whose primary current project is kapurfoundation.net, which seeks to improve #nutrition globally. Stay tuned for an opportunity for ENGINEERS to participate in a project to help improve the ways we eat.

🎂 Happy 124th Birthday to Curt Herzstark, born July 26, 1902! He designed the Curta, the first pocket-sized mechanical calculator. He refined it while imprisoned at Buchenwald, then redrew it from memory after the war so it could finally be built. ithistory.org/honoree/curt...

Bernd Ulmann, who builds and collects analog computers, with a prediction for the next twenty years worth holding him to. #AnalogComputing #ComputingHistory

Peggy Kidwell, curator emerita at the Smithsonian, gave the clearest definition of the day. Analog devices represent numbers by continuous quantities, like a slide rule or astrolabe. Digital devices represent them by discrete quantities, like an abacus. #AnalogComputing #ComputingHistory

George Dyson, historian of technology, on our panel: if the nervous system is the original analog computer, what does that say about the machines we are trying to rebuild? #AnalogComputing #ComputingHistory

At our analog computing panel, Bernd Ulmann showed a patched analog program from the early 1970s holding the full vehicle dynamics of a VW Golf 1. VW used it to develop the car. The machines were scrapped decades ago, so this may be the only piece left. #AnalogComputing #ComputingHistory

🎂 Happy 104th Birthday to Kathleen Booth, born July 9, 1922! At Birkbeck College she wrote what is credited as the first assembly language and designed the assembler for the ARC and APE(X)C computers. The machines were built around her; she gave them a language. ithistory.org/honoree/kath...

Clive England of cray-history.net on the design choice behind Cray's range, and how it echoes the analog computer. #AnalogComputing #ComputingHistory

🎂 Happy 274th Birthday to Joseph Marie Jacquard, born July 7, 1752! His loom wove patterns from chains of punched cards, the first machine run by interchangeable instructions. That idea of a program on cards carried straight into the history of computing. ithistory.org/honoree/jose...

🎂 Happy 65th Birthday to Brendan Eich, born July 4, 1961! In 1995 at Netscape he created JavaScript in ten days. Three decades on, it still runs in nearly every browser on Earth. He later co-founded Mozilla and the Brave browser. ithistory.org/honoree/bren...

🎂 Happy 50th Birthday to Fei-Fei Li, born July 3, 1976! She led the creation of ImageNet, the dataset that set off the deep learning revolution in computer vision. A Stanford professor and co-director of its Institute for Human-Centered AI. ithistory.org/honoree/fei-...

Peggy Kidwell, curator emerita at the Smithsonian, with the definition every analog-versus-digital conversation should start from. #AnalogComputing #ComputingHistory

Bernd Ulmann runs a car traveling over a rough road on his analog computer, modeled as a two-mass spring-damper system. Nothing is executing code. The bouncing is continuous voltages settling through the machine in real time. #AnalogComputing #ComputingHistory

George Dyson, historian of technology, says the analog-digital line runs through us. His brain is an analog computer, and so are all nervous systems: digital for memory and error correction, analog for real-time computing where the answer has to arrive all at once. #AnalogComputing #ComputingHistory

Alan Turing was born 114 years ago today, on June 23, 1912. Father of theoretical computer science, Bletchley Park codebreaker, and the mind behind the Turing test -- his legacy shapes every computer ever built. 🧠 Died at 41 by #suicide. ithistory.org/honoree/alan... #ITHistory

Today would have been Konrad Zuse's 116th birthday (June 22, 1910). Working entirely independently from Allied computing efforts, he built the Z3 (1941), the first working program-controlled digital computer. 🖥️ ithistory.org/honoree/konr... #ITHistory #ComputerHistory

What was your first game? For many of us, a computer first felt like OURS the first day it let us PLAY. A text adventure on one floppy. Green characters in a dark maze. A cartridge you blew on and hoped. Tell us your first, or an early favorite? #ITHistory #ComputingHistory #RetroGaming

Bernd Ulmann points at a board that looks like chaos: a spaghetti of wires connecting computing elements. That tangle is the program. An analog computer is non-algorithmic; the wiring becomes a model that behaves, mathematically, like the problem you want to solve. #AnalogComputing #ComputingHistory

We wish a happy 71st birthday 🎂 to Tim Berners-Lee, born June 8, 1955! He invented the World Wide Web in 1989 and gave it away freely: no patents, no licensing fees. Just a free and open internet for everyone. 🌐 ithistory.org/honoree/timo... #ITHistory #WWW