Explore Pioneering Software on the Computer History Museum

The Computer History Museum is likely one of the most well-known establishments of its sort. Located in Mountain View, Calif., the museum chronicles the impression of computing and technological innovation by artifacts and thru archived movies, pictures, and paperwork. The employees conducts oral histories, hosts stay occasions, and curates reveals.

All its work wouldn’t be potential with out the museum’s skilled historians of know-how. One is David C. Brock, director of curatorial affairs, who additionally heads the museum’s Software History Center. His analysis focuses on histories of computing, electronics, semiconductors, and software program. He has carried out greater than 200 oral histories of pioneers within the fields.

The IEEE affiliate member has been with the museum since 2016 and has curated reveals and occasions whereas often publishing historic essays.

One latest challenge he’s excited to be engaged on is the “Art of Code” exhibition, which is scheduled to run by subsequent yr. Exploring how software program is developed, the exhibit additionally considers its impacts.

“The ‘Art of Code’ is an opportunity for us to hold events around releases of some important historical source code for the first time,” Brock says. Visitors will be capable of look behind the scenes of making pc code, see how the software program works, and notice how the code was organized.

Brock says he believes it’s essential to make the supply code accessible for traditionally essential applications as “an object for study, just like other objects in a museum.”

“These historical source code releases are something that’s unique to the Computer History Museum,” he says.

Smalltalk, PostScript, and the Apple Lisa

The “Art of Code” kicked off with the September celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of Smalltalk. The programming language and atmosphere was developed at Xerox Parc, in Palo Alto, Calif.

“The Smalltalk approach to computer programming and computer languages is called object-oriented programming, and it has been highly influential,” Brock says. “Many of the most commonly used programming languages today embody this object-oriented programming approach.”

The pioneers who developed Smalltalk mentioned its impression throughout a museum occasion. (You can also learn IEEE Spectrum’s Q&A with Adele Goldberg, one of many builders, concerning the affect the language has had on programming.)

This month the museum plans to launch the supply code for Adobe’s PostScript, which performed a key position within the digital revolution in printing and publishing, Brock says.

The supply code for Apple’s Lisa, the predecessor to the Macintosh, is ready to be exhibited subsequent month. Brock says that though Lisa wasn’t a business success, it was essential in establishing the graphical person interface as we all know it as we speak.

“The Lisa computer introduced the whole idiom of the desktop, folders, and the ‘What you see is what you get’ type of word processors,” he says. WYSIWYG reveals customers how content material will seem on a printed web page, with out the necessity for extra coding.

Understanding how a know-how develops

Brock grew up throughout the rise of non-public computer systems and pc networking. He says he used to have a simplistic view of science and know-how, assuming there was “a straightforward scientific method—that science just gets transferred over into new technologies.”

It wasn’t till he studied logic and the philosophy of science at Brown University, in Providence, R.I., that he “became fascinated by how important technology is for society and culture but how little we understand how it develops and evolves,” he says. “That’s what got me interested in looking to the past to understand how science and technology work.”

He went on to earn a grasp’s diploma within the sociology of scientific information from the University of Edinburgh and one other grasp’s within the historical past of science from Princeton.

“At first, I looked at technology from a philosophy of science point of view,” he says. “In subsequent studies, I looked at it from a sociological point of view.” What he discovered, he says, is that the historical past of know-how is basically about individuals.

Documenting the life and instances of Gordon Moore

Before becoming a member of the Computer History Museum, Brock labored for 17 years on the Science History Institute, in Philadelphia. One factor he observed there was that the contributions of these engaged on the chemistry, chemical engineering, and materials sciences of built-in circuits and semiconductors had been underappreciated.

He determined to conduct oral histories with the pioneers of semiconductor electronics, together with Intel cofounder Gordon Moore.

That led Brock to coauthor a number of books together with Moore’s Law: The Life of Gordon Moore, Silicon Valley’s Quiet Revolutionary andMakers of the Microchip: A Documentary History of Fairchild Semiconductor. He additionally wrote and helped produce a number of documentaries, together with Moore’s Law at 50 and Scientists You Must Know: Gordon Moore.

Collaborations on IEEE Milestones

Brock has collaborated with the IEEE History Center and the IEEE Santa Clara Valley (Calif.) Section on the IEEE Milestones program, which acknowledges excellent technical developments world wide. On 11 September 2021, IEEE and the Computer History Museum held an occasion to commemorate 11 milestones in Silicon Valley. They included Shakey the robotic, the RISC and SPARC chips, and the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory. The museum has a devoted wall the place many IEEE Milestone plaques are displayed.

Brock is an energetic IEEE volunteer. He has served on IEEE Spectrum’s editorial advisory board and the IEEE Computer Society’s historical past committee. His articles for Spectrum embrace a profile of superconducting pioneer Dudley Buck and a have a look at the origins of PowerPoint. He is on the editorial board of the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing.

“My role in IEEE is interesting: a historian contributing to this community without a formal background—or employment—in electrical engineering,” Brock says. “What I’ve continually enjoyed is how much interest there is in history among IEEE members, and how history can connect and instruct these communities.”