When we think about the development of computers, we often think into the future: we imagine (or work on developing) new software, ever larger capacities for data storage, and ever smaller, sleeker hardware design.

But Ptak Science Books, a blog on the history of science with an emphasis on images, gives us an interesting look. . .   Read More

Long before the era of the Internet, humans already dreamt of creating the perfect search engine.

In 01895 two Belgian lawyers, Paul Otlet and Henri la Fontaine, began building their Universal Bibliographic Repertory: a card catalog similar to that of a library, but vastly larger. It aimed to classify all human knowledge and provide searchable. . .   Read More

Advances in computing technology have led to increasingly powerful devices – a cell phone can now do what early desktop computers did not even approximate. But these developments have largely been in the form of devices, objects made of silicon and plastic. Stanford bioengineering professor Drew Endy imagines, in a New York Times article, another frontier. . .   Read More

The Computer History Museum’s newly re-designed main exhibition, Revolution: The First 2,000 Years of Computing, is now open to the public. Starting with the abacus and ending with social networking, the exhibit traces our ongoing attempts to mechanically and digitally keep track of our world. In between the two is a history. . .   Read More

http://www.antikythera-mechanism.gr http://www.boingboing.net/2010/12/09/how-the-antikythera.html

John Rennie over at IEEE Spectrum has an excellent article on Ray Kurzweil’s 108 predictions for 02009 from his book Age of Spiritual Machines.  Ray Kurzweil is an avid and fearless predictor who also logged the first of our Long Bets with Mitch Kapor.  I think it is great that people are taking the. . .   Read More

Nature reports quantum computing researchers achieve “success at entangling three-circuit systems”.

“The entanglement of two or more qubits sets up a ‘superposition’ of states in which calculations can run in parallel — in principle allowing a quantum computer to race through problems that it would take a classical computer eons to solve. Such a quantum. . .   Read More

The usual “digital dark age” stories we see are the ones where people lose data because a platform obsolesces.  Business Week is running an interesting story about a computer platform that has refused to obsolesce, and it is the people who are leaving it behind – The Mainframe.  It turns out that there are still over. . .   Read More

“Long Shorts” – short films that exemplify long-term thinking.  Please submit yours in the comments section…

Information Pioneers: Ada Lovelace from Information Pioneers on Vimeo.

This is a nice intro to Ada Lovelace, the first computer programmer who wrote programs for Babbage’s mechanical computer. While this computer is similar to the binary mechanical computer. . .   Read More

Patrick Tufts sent in these absolute gems.  Historical training videos for mechanical computers from the US Navy which used them as fire control computers.  It is so easy to forget where modern computers got their start.  We assume they are all gray boxes with monitors attached, but back in the good old days they were. . .   Read More