President Eisenhower’s Civil Rights Act, Dr. Seuss’ The Cat in the Hat, and the launch of Sputnik by the Soviet Union were respectively important social, cultural, and technical news stories of 1957. There is one event that year did not make headlines but over the next 60 years also profoundly impacted all three aspect
In April 2016, filmmaker Oscar Sharp and NYU artificial intelligence researcher Ross Goodwin teamed up to create the short film Sunspring. Goodwin created an AI bot called Benjamin to write the script, and Sharp filmed it as a part of the SCI-FI-LONDON 48 Hour Film Challenge. It was impressive, but it wasn’t exactly so
One day, while I was going through the videos in our archive at the Computer History Museum, I came across an interesting title: Mockingbird—A Composer’s Amanuensis. I instantly realized this was the video that I’d been waiting for ever since I started exploring computer music.
By 2006 it was already clear to most people in the computing industry that the future was mobile. The cell phone was on its way to becoming the most common electronic device on earth, with over 2.7 billion users. Yet it was almost equally clear that the main events wouldn’t happen in Silicon Valley, or even the United
Outside of my life as a curator, I work with several film festivals as a film programmer. I am heavily invested in the Oscars every year, and most deeply involved with the Oscar for Best Animated Short Film. Having seen every Oscar nominee in the category since 1980, and nearly two-thirds of all the rest, I can say tha
In many parts of our world today, group communication centers on visual materials built with “presentation software,” often crafted by a speaker him or herself. As a result, meetings now generally depend on the use of personal computers, presentation software in the guises of product or service and display by digital p
The 2016 Vintage Computer Festival (VCF), an amazing grass-roots showcase of historical computers, was held at the Computer History Museum recently. VCF has a rich history and is a favorite event among computer enthusiasts everywhere with new standout exhibits each year.
In the very, very, beginning, the World Wide Web was meant to be a two-way medium. You could post and edit your own pages as easily as you could browse those created by others. But the browsers that made the web popular left out editing features.
Harold Cohen was a pioneer in computer art, in algorithmic art, and in generative art; but as he told me one afternoon in 2010, he was first and foremost a painter. He was also an engineer whose work defined the first generation of computer-generated art. His system, AARON, is one of the longest-running, continually ma
This month marks 25 years since the Web’s public announcement in several online forums and the release of the WWW code library, libWWW. The library was a kind of “roll your own” tool kit that gave volunteer programmers the pieces they needed to write their own Web browsers and servers. Their efforts—over half a dozen
