iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

IT History Society @ithistory.org · 29/09/2026

The patch panel is the iconic image of an analog computer: a board of wires you rewire for each problem. Bernd Ulmann, who builds and restores these machines, makes the case for leaving it behind, and shows the reconfigurable computer he built without one. #AnalogComputing #ComputingHistory

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IT History Society @ithistory.org · 27/09/2026

By our count this is at least the 5th time computing has been told it was ending the world: automation in the late 1950s, the computer in the missile silo, Japan's Fifth Generation, Y2K, and now AI. How seriously do you take today's forecasts, against those you've lived through? #AI #Y2K #doom

The mushroom cloud of the Baker nuclear test rising over Bikini Atoll in 1946, with warships silhouetted at its base and palm trees in the foreground. Photo: U.S. Department of Defense, public domain.

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IT History Society @ithistory.org · 24/09/2026

Peggy Kidwell, curator emerita at the Smithsonian, on a strange feature of the modern museum: the most used computer in the room is the one in your pocket. #AnalogComputing #ComputingHistory

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IT History Society @ithistory.org · 23/09/2026

🎂 Celebrating Georg Scheutz, born September 23, 1785. The Swedish lawyer and translator built the first machine to calculate and print mathematical tables, working from Babbage's difference engine design with his son Edvard. He would have turned 241. ithistory.org/honoree/geor...

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IT History Society @ithistory.org · 22/09/2026

George Dyson, historian of technology: as we build an essentially unlimited amount of digital processing, more of our computing ends up resting on continuous functions. Analog is back, whether we like it or not. #AnalogComputing #ComputingHistory

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IT History Society @ithistory.org · 17/09/2026

Clive England of cray-history.net on the bet behind Cray supercomputing: breadth over depth, many simulations over one perfect answer. #AnalogComputing #ComputingHistory

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IT History Society @ithistory.org · 16/09/2026

🎂 Susan L. Graham turns 84 today. Born September 16, 1942, the longtime UC Berkeley professor helped build Berkeley Pascal and co-created Gprof, the profiling tool still used to find performance bottlenecks in software. ithistory.org/honoree/susa...

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IT History Society @ithistory.org · 15/09/2026

David Alan Grier on the 1946 Moore School lectures: the people building digital computers treated analog as the old style, and most of them wanted to set it aside entirely to focus the money and attention on the stored program digital computer. #AnalogComputing #ComputingHistory

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IT History Society @ithistory.org · 11/09/2026

A few months ago the Historical Committee at ACM was kind enough to invite @aaronsylvan (Chair of IT History Society) to visit its Annual Meeting. We're very grateful for the outreach; we believe it's important for related organizations to share connections.

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IT History Society @ithistory.org · 08/09/2026

Bernd Ulmann, who builds analog computers, predicts that within twenty years they will sit inside nearly every machine as co-processors, about as routinely as graphics cards do now, handling AI and differential equations alongside the digital computer. #AnalogComputing #ComputingHistory

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IT History Society @ithistory.org · 04/09/2026

🎂 Two hundred years ago this year, Martin Wiberg was born, on September 4, 1826. The Swedish inventor built a calculating machine the size of a sewing machine that could compute and print full mathematical tables, refining the earlier engine of Georg Scheutz. ithistory.org/honoree/mart...

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IT History Society @ithistory.org · 04/09/2026

🎂 On this day in 1927, John McCarthy was born. He invented the Lisp programming language and coined the term "artificial intelligence" in 1955, for the Dartmouth conference that founded the field. Turing Award, 1971. He would have turned 99. ithistory.org/honoree/john...

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IT History Society @ithistory.org · 03/09/2026

Bernd Ulmann: an analog program is a spaghetti of wires that turns the machine into a model behaving just like the problem you want to solve. #AnalogComputing #ComputingHistory

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IT History Society @ithistory.org · 02/09/2026

Long before Anthropic's "Sonnet," home-computer owners typed programs from magazines like "Poetry" to make their machines write verse: a random-number generator plus borrowed phrases like "quoth the raven." Did you ever type a program in from a magazine? What did you first make a computer create?

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IT History Society @ithistory.org · 01/09/2026

Peggy Kidwell, curator emerita at the Smithsonian: most visitors now arrive carrying a computer and use it more than they look at the objects in the cases. So which device deserves to be called the most important? It gets complicated. #AnalogComputing #ComputingHistory

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IT History Society @ithistory.org · 31/08/2026

Viking Calendar, c. 18th Century, at National Museum of Iceland (www.thjodminjasafn.is/en), photos by @aaronsylvan, #premodern #computing #mechanical

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IT History Society @ithistory.org · 30/08/2026

🎂 Celebrating John Mauchly, born August 30, 1907. With J. Presper Eckert he co-invented ENIAC, the first general-purpose electronic computer, and went on to build UNIVAC I, the first commercial computer made in the United States. He would have turned 119. ithistory.org/honoree/john...

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IT History Society @ithistory.org · 27/08/2026

David Alan Grier, former IEEE Computer Society president, on how digital computing reshaped the workforce as much as the technology. #AnalogComputing #ComputingHistory

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IT History Society @ithistory.org · 25/08/2026

Bernd Ulmann, who builds analog computers, says he truly understood several branches of mathematics only after building the problems on an analog computer and watching them run. In his words, a wonderful educational tool. #AnalogComputing #ComputingHistory

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IT History Society @ithistory.org · 21/08/2026

Did you know the oldest name in our database was born around the year 780? We charted all 1,375 honorees by time, each a bar from birth to death, or to 2026 if still living, reaching from al-Khwārizmī to people alive today. Browse from the oldest: ithistory.org/honorees?sort_by=oldest -RD

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IT History Society @ithistory.org · 20/08/2026

🎂 Alice Rowe Burks would have turned 106 today. Born August 20, 1920, she was one of the "women computers" at the Moore School during the ENIAC years, and later a historian of early computing who co-wrote Who Invented the Computer? (2003). ithistory.org/honoree/alic...

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IT History Society @ithistory.org · 19/08/2026

Clive England of cray-history.net on Cray supercomputing: rather than analyzing one problem in exhaustive depth, the idea was to run tens of thousands of simulations in parallel and study the average of what came back. #AnalogComputing #ComputingHistory

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IT History Society @ithistory.org · 18/08/2026

🎂 Born in Budapest on August 18, 1911, Klára Dán von Neumann became one of the earliest computer programmers. She wrote the code that ran on the MANIAC at Los Alamos, helped rework ENIAC's controls, and taught early weather scientists to program. Would have turned 115. ithistory.org/honoree/klar...

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IT History Society @ithistory.org · 13/08/2026

George Dyson, historian of technology, on why analog keeps resurfacing in an industry that assumed it had moved on for good. #AnalogComputing #ComputingHistory

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IT History Society @ithistory.org · 11/08/2026

David Alan Grier, former IEEE Computer Society president: digital computers created an entirely new class of workers, the programmers, and a new division of labor that pulled people into technology in ways that had never existed before. #AnalogComputing #ComputingHistory

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IT History Society @ithistory.org · 10/08/2026

🎂 On this day in 1911, Jan Rajchman was born. An RCA engineer with over 100 patents, he conceived the first read-only memory and pioneered magnetic core memory, which stored data in nearly every computer of the 1950s and 60s. He would have turned 115. ithistory.org/honoree/jan-...

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IT History Society @ithistory.org · 07/08/2026

ITHS chair @aaronsylvan.com discussed co-curation with Clive England of cray-history.net ... QUESTION: should ITHS partner with enthusiasts who have expertise in different domains, as moderators for various sections of @ithistory.org? We think the answer is YES. Contact Us to join the alpha group!

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IT History Society @ithistory.org · 06/08/2026

David Alan Grier, former IEEE Computer Society president, on the scale of what transistors and large-scale integration set loose in a single lifetime. #AnalogComputing #ComputingHistory

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IT History Society @ithistory.org · 04/08/2026

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

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IT History Society @ithistory.org · 30/07/2026

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

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IT History Society @ithistory.org · 29/07/2026

🎂 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...

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IT History Society @ithistory.org · 28/07/2026

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

The starship USS Enterprise rendered entirely in ASCII characters.

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IT History Society @ithistory.org · 28/07/2026

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

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IT History Society @ithistory.org · 27/07/2026

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.

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IT History Society @ithistory.org · 26/07/2026

🎂 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...

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IT History Society @ithistory.org · 23/07/2026

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

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IT History Society @ithistory.org · 21/07/2026

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

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IT History Society @ithistory.org · 16/07/2026

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

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IT History Society @ithistory.org · 14/07/2026

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

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IT History Society @ithistory.org · 09/07/2026

🎂 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...

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IT History Society @ithistory.org · 08/07/2026

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

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IT History Society @ithistory.org · 07/07/2026

🎂 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...

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IT History Society @ithistory.org · 04/07/2026

🎂 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...

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IT History Society @ithistory.org · 03/07/2026

🎂 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-...

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IT History Society @ithistory.org · 02/07/2026

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

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IT History Society @ithistory.org · 30/06/2026

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

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IT History Society @ithistory.org · 25/06/2026

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

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IT History Society @ithistory.org · 23/06/2026

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

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IT History Society @ithistory.org · 22/06/2026

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

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IT History Society @ithistory.org · 18/06/2026

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

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