Do you remember the first time you played Oregon Trail on an Apple II? Used a mouse? Designed and printed a newsletter on your Macintosh? Perhaps wrote your first line of code? We think you’ll agree that software—and the code that drives it—is magical.
Follow us for a year-long exploration and celebration of the Art of Code! We’re holding events, publishing little-known insights, and releasing historic source code from Adobe, Apple, and Xerox PARC. As the leading museum decoding technology’s past, present, and future, we plan to intrigue and wow you.
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Researchers at Xerox’s revolutionary Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) stored their project files on a shared server from the 1970s up to 1994. CHM and key volunteers have recovered source code, executables, and documentation files of all kinds from the server’s backup tapes and worked to make this enormous archive accessible to the public for the first time.
Available now!
CHM has released a new oral history of Turing Award winner Ivan Sutherland to the public for the first time. The two-part video and accompanying transcripts cover the span of Sutherland’s remarkable life and career, and the release will include the source code for his Sketchpad computer graphics program to celebrate it 60th anniversary.
Read about the oral histories.
Check out the Sketchpad source code.
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Before the Macintosh, there was Lisa. Though a commercial failure, the Lisa brought the first modern graphical user interface out of the lab at Xerox PARC in 1983. Then, the Apple Macintosh became the first successful computer to deliver the graphical user interface “to the rest of us.” Without the Lisa, there wouldn’t be a Mac or an iPhone. Learn More.
Available now!
For digital printing to take off in the early 1980s, a new programming language needed to be developed that could define the words and images on printed pages across different computers and printers. That revolutionary software was Adobe’s PostScript, and it led directly to the PDF format that is everywhere today. Learn more.
