Sign in

IT History Society

@ithistory.org
107 followers 65 following 117 posts

Founded in 1977, the IT History Society celebrates the evolution of ideas that shaped computing, especially untold stories and unsung heroes. We are a 501c3 not-for-profit. · New to Bluesky? Follow the field → bluesky.ithistory.org/pack

PostsRepliesMedia
IT History Society @ithistory.org · 21h
A neat piece of preservation infrastructure: scan a book's barcode and find out whether the Internet Archive already holds it. Worth running along your own shelves.
020
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
020
IT History Society @ithistory.org · 28/09/2026
Amazing, congratulations!!
010
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.
010
IT History Society @ithistory.org · 25/09/2026
Vertical text mapping? NICE! Getting tategaki to index correctly is where most OCR pipelines give up, so congratulations on the pilot. Neo Geo Freak is a fine place to start.
100
IT History Society @ithistory.org · 25/09/2026
Five thousand out-of-print magazines, digitized and searchable. Congratulations to the Video Game History Foundation, whose archive shows what community scanning and industry partnership can accomplish together!
010
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
000
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...
030
IT History Society @ithistory.org · 23/09/2026
The Tony Sale Award honors the restoration work that keeps the artifacts of computing history operational. The September 29 in-person ceremony is sold out, but the livestream is still open to anyone!
000
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
020
IT History Society @ithistory.org · 21/09/2026
Forty years ago the BBC Domesday Project put a portrait of 1980s Britain on interactive LaserDisc, then became a landmark case in digital preservation. A fitting anniversary at the Centre for Computing History.
000
IT History Society @ithistory.org · 21/09/2026
Our vote goes to the ancestor of them all: Spacewar!, written at MIT in 1962 for the PDP-1 and its round CRT display. Much of what followed on your list owes it a debt. Enjoy the festival.
010
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
010
IT History Society @ithistory.org · 17/09/2026
We have found that properly structured AI tools are vastly better than people, at checking sources. One data set involved thousands of citations: hundreds of human errors found; when we manually checked items flagged by AI, it was 100% correct. Work that would have taken weeks was done in an hour.
060
IT History Society @ithistory.org · 16/09/2026
Leave it to the Internet Archive to think of preserving the "under construction" signs we historically ignored (or took for granted, or rolled our eyes at).
010
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...
020
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
000
IT History Society @ithistory.org · 14/09/2026
Nothing exposes defects quite like exposure to the real world. Donald Knuth famously ended a lecture, “Beware of bugs in the above code. I have merely proven it to be correct, not tried it.”
010
IT History Society @ithistory.org · 13/09/2026
One could argue that the FPU specialized co-processor was a first step toward the GPUs that drive modern AI computing..
041
IT History Society @ithistory.org · 11/09/2026
Reel-to-reel is one of the few formats where the carrier carries history too (splice marks, leader tape, someone's handwriting on the box) … unfortunately almost none of that survives into digital files.
000
IT History Society @ithistory.org · 11/09/2026
The Centre for Computing History has a Sun SPARCstation Voyager on the bench… it’s a 1994 attempt at a workstation you could carry (“luggable”?), and a reminder that portable UNIX was once a radical proposition.
010
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.
110
IT History Society @ithistory.org · 09/09/2026
Knitting machine punch cards are one of the few strands of computing history still in everyday use — Nichole Misako Nomura's essay on reading and preserving them is well worth your time. See also Jacquard and his programmable looms: ithistory.org/honoree/jose...
ithistory.org
Joseph Marie Jacquard | IT History Society
010
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
010
IT History Society @ithistory.org · 07/09/2026
MS-DOS games on Internet Archive!! #RetroGaming #MSDOS #DOSGames #InternetArchive #GamePreservation #RetroComputing #PCGaming
062
IT History Society @ithistory.org · 07/09/2026
Agreed! Broadcast tech journalism is among the worst-preserved records of its era, precisely because everyone assumed a network would keep it... If tapes or off-air recordings surface, we would gladly help point them toward an archive. (We're exploring a new indexing system for a/v media, too...)
030
Reposted by IT History Society
SDF @sdforg.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
Happy Labor Day! Come see the PDP-10 today at icm.museum
1136
IT History Society @ithistory.org · 04/09/2026
Harvest ran at NSA from 1962 to 1976: an IBM Stretch bolted to a custom streaming #coprocessor, fed by the world's first robotic tape library. (Specialized accelerators have been around for quite a while!) #ComputerHistory #VintageComputing #IBM #NSA #ColdWar
051
IT History Society @ithistory.org · 04/09/2026
Many people think @atari.com was first, but it was just the first to be *everywhere*. Home #videogames using a television set began years earlier...
020
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...
010
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...
031
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
020
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?
000
IT History Society @ithistory.org · 02/09/2026
We recommend traveling to see @tnmoc.bsky.social on Bletchley Park, but second-best would be to check out this long-form (30min) super-tour by @nostalgianerd.com — amazing discussion of some of the very first computing devices (and ending with classic home computers of late '70s and early '80s)!
051
IT History Society @ithistory.org · 02/09/2026
A well-made Apple-1 replica earns its place in a collection: originals are effectively unreachable, and the board still shows how 1976 hardware actually worked. Congratulations to TNMOC and their donor. #RetroTech #VintageComputing
020
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
010
IT History Society @ithistory.org · 31/08/2026
Core Memory, with its tiny physical donuts making physical connections to store bits, is an astonishing marvel — Ken Shirriff gives a great explanation and set of photos here…
010
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
000
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...
020
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
020
IT History Society @ithistory.org · 26/08/2026
Early Mac 🍎 users had .sit (Stuff-It) as the standard archiving package. Nice that someone is working to keep the decompression software alive! #datacompression #macintosh #vintagemac #vintagecomputing #stuffit #stuffitdeluxe
021
IT History Society @ithistory.org · 26/08/2026
A useful correction for anyone who pictures ALL mass digitization as an industrial shredder: the Internet Archive still scans its books page by page, by hand, and the books come out the other side intact! #training #ai #scanning #vintagebooks #history #ithistory #bibliophilia #loveofbooks
020
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
010
IT History Society @ithistory.org · 24/08/2026
Shall we play a game?
011
IT History Society @ithistory.org · 24/08/2026
Tabletop Tic-Tac-Toe! (Noughts and Crosses if you’re across the pond)
020
IT History Society @ithistory.org · 24/08/2026
The dream of “a machine that seems to think” began decades ago: ELIZA, Alter Ego and Little Computer People, now gathered in one collection at the Internet Archive!
210522
IT History Society @ithistory.org · 22/08/2026
Well put — and some older artifacts have better odds than newer ones. Punched cards and line-printer output survive neglect; a spinning disk may be extremely unreadable without maintenance and the right drivers. Vintage software platforms are even more ephemeral.
000
IT History Society @ithistory.org · 22/08/2026
Typography is computing history too: the Letterform Archive's digitized collection at the Internet Archive runs from ancient scripts to Olivetti typewriter manuals and corporate identity guides.
220457
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
000
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...
020