Category: History of Computing and Multimedia

M.S. Mahoney – Articles on the History of Computing is a page of links by the Princeton historian to articles about the history of computing. He argues in “The History of Computing in the History of Technology” that “the history of computing has yet to establish a significant presence in the history of science” (p. 1 of the PDF). As a result a lot of the popular history of computing out there is “heroic” and focuses on people or companies and insider knowledge.
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Temporal Modelling is a project led by Johanna Drucker looking at ways to model time. At McMaster we are getting some 3D environments and visualization expertise and I would like to try developing a 3D time visualization environment.
Continue reading 3D Timelines

History Matrix is a massive timeline project by Shiralee Saul. It weaves all sorts of timelines together into a matrix of events. It is not complete and there are parts that don’t work, but it is ambitious and thought provoking.

Hobbes’ Internet Timeline – the definitive ARPAnet & Internet history is a great history of the Internet with both a timeline, graphs, and bibliography. It was last updated in July of 2003.

Dead Media Project is a project inspired by Bruce Sterling to keep track of media that are no longer used. They have a timeline and notes.
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What if we organized a project around documenting what computing humanists do. “A Day in Humanities Computing” would be a voluntary project where selected HC people with digital cameras would take pictures of what they are doing and write a TEI encoded document that describes their day. It could be coded with subject headings to allow people to search the journal entries. Above all it should be accessible to give people an idea of what we do.
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Core77 Articles: Pixelvision is an article on the history of the pixel. I got the link from Matt K’s blog.
Continue reading Birth of the Pixel

The Best of Creative Computing were magazine/book collections of articles on computing and culture from 1976 – 7. There are articles on computer art, AI, computer poetry and so on. It has a Computer Lib feeling. Both volume 1 and 2 are scanned in at: http://www.atariarchives.org/bcc1/. At this site there are also full scans of other early computing books.