Do you remember 1998? That was the year Google was founded, France won the World Cup, and Microsoft was the largest company in the world. And a furry little creature—half owl, half hamster—was the “it” gift for the holiday season. Marketed in a high-profile advertising campaign on television and mass media, Furby was a $35 digital toy that captured the imaginations of millions around the world and continues to have an active community of fans today.

Furby was a robotic “friend” that could respond to touch, light, and sound. An electric motor and a system of cams and gears closed the Furby’s eyes and mouth, raised its ears, and lifted it off the ground. Equipped with these sensors and motors, Furbys could blink, wiggle their ears, and even dance to music. They came in several different outfits and dozens of colors, but they all spoke “Furbish,” an imaginary language that slowly morphed into English as the creature interacted more with its owner.

Kids going wild for Furbys at New York’s FAO Schwartz store, 1998. Credit: UNITED STATES – OCTOBER 02: Students from PS 59 meet Furby, a new interactive toy, at FAO Schwarz. (Photo by Susan Watts/NY Daily News Archive via Getty Images)

The Furby Frenzy

Catapulting demand for the toys during the initial 1998 holiday season drove the resale price to well over US $100 and sometimes several times that. As supplies dwindled, arguments and fistfights broke out between rival parents at Toys R’ Us stores. When supplies ran out, consumers turned to the internet, where Furbys could be purchased for many times their retail price.

Furby also caught the attention of American intelligence agencies and the Federal Aviation Administration. The FAA was concerned that the little creatures might interfere with takeoffs and landings and cause safety issues. It even issued an alert that, “Furbys should not be on when the plane is below 10,000 feet.” Because of the way Furbys reacted to light, touch and sound, and fearing that Furbys might record their surroundings (they don’t), the US National Security Agency banned the toy from its headquarters in 1999, as did the US Naval Shipyard in Portsmouth, VA.

Original Furby (1998) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Furby#/media/File:Furby_vert_(Tiger).jpg

But no one else seemed to be worried: During the first three years of production, over 40 million Furbys were sold. A global phenomenon, people from Birmingham to Berlin to Bombay clamored for a fuzzy little creature of their own. The hysteria continued for several years, in part because Furbys were so customizable, making it one of the hottest toys of the late ’90s and early 2000s.

Speaking Furbish

Unveiling of the new Furby toy at the UN Plaza on Aug. 2, 2005, in New York City. https://www.nydailynews.com/2023/06/27/furby-then-and-now/

In 2019, CHM’s Director of Curatorial Affairs David Brock interviewed Furby co-inventor David Hampton about his goals in creating Furby and its language abilities.

In his oral history, Hampton also relates how when customers who reported a broken Furby were told they would have to send it in to get a replacement, they often decided to keep the original instead. It was their Furby—drooping ear or broken gears and all.

Furby Forever

Like many things that change popular culture and, in turn, are changed by it, Furbys appeared in movies, TV shows, and even in the lyrics of songs. In fact, sometimes the line got blurred. Tiger Electronics (Hasbro), who made the toy, sued the Warner Brothers film studio for the Furby’s resemblance to the “Gizmo” character in their comedy-horror movie, Gremlins. (It was settled out of court).

Actress Hilary Duff unwraps a Furby during her 18th birthday party on Sept. 28, 2005, inside Club Mood in Hollywood, CA. https://www.nydailynews.com/2023/06/27/furby-then-and-now/

With the rise of the internet, online communities dedicated to Furbys sprang up rapidly, with enthusiasts sharing tips on how to care for their robotic pets and teaching each other the nuances of Furbish.

Furby’s popularity continues to this day, with thousands of passionate collectors and experts discussing Furby facts and trivia online, as well as a very active market for the toys on eBay. Furbys are a durable cultural touchstone that brought a new degree of fun and interactivity to toys. It’s simplicity and customizability remain its strengths, and with the 2023 Furby the legend lives on for new generations to enjoy.

The secret to its success? Furby creator Hampton says, “Here’s what I think: The magic act worked. . . . people added their own imagination to the toy and made it become better than what I had created. They became part of it.”

Visit the Furbys in CHM’s collection and see David Hampton’s full video oral history here.

Main image: Original Furby, 1998. https://official-furby.fandom.com/wiki/Official_Furby_Wiki

SUPPORT CHM’S MISSION

The care and feeding of our Furbys and other artifacts of the computing revolution would not be possible without the generous support of people like you who care deeply about decoding technology. Please consider making a donation.

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Last spring, on the occasion of its 25th anniversary, VMware reached out to the Computer History Museum with a proposal to create the VMware Founders Collection. The resulting collaboration preserves the history of one of Silicon Valley’s most innovative and successful companies. I’m the archivist tasked with building it from scratch.

The VM in VMware stands for “virtual machine.” When presented with this assignment, I was a bit stumped. What artifacts can we collect for a company whose product is virtual?

Solving Hard Problems

VMware’s history is one of the most compelling Silicon Valley stories I’ve ever heard. It begins with smart people trying to solve difficult problems. In the late 1990s, one of those problems was that computers could only run one operating system. In some cases, individual business applications took up an entire machine, while utilizing less than 20% of the machine’s capability. The x86 virtualization program developed by VMware’s founding technologists Mendel Rosenblum, Scott Devine, Ellen Wang, and Edouard Bugnion, enabled a single machine to be segmented into several virtual machines, each with its own operating system.

Once virtualized, computers could handle multiple functions safely and securely. The savings in hardware, space, electricity, and human resources were incredible.

The front cover of VMware Ready to Run Virtual Machine software CDs with a photograph of company founders, 2000. Catalog number 102801286.

Virtualize Everything

Thus was VMware’s vision born: to “virtualize everything.” It was a pretty easy sell to enterprises in the early 2000s. In just a few years, VMware had succeeded in virtualizing individual computers and turned its attention to virtualizing networks, another formidable challenge. Under the leadership of CEO Diane Greene, VMware built its smart team into a company with some of the best engineers in the business. Over the course of several years, VMware’s innovators developed effective and reliable ways to virtualize all kinds of networks.

Installation discs for VMware vSphere 4 and 1 installation disc for Cisco Nexus 1000V Virtual Ethernet Module for VMware vSphere 4 from 2009. Catalog number 102801283.

Virtualization at many levels and in many different areas of computing has enabled the IT revolution in which we are currently living. It is, in fact, the very basis of cloud computing.

But still, as an archivist, I had to ask, “What are the things we can collect? What can we put in our museum to tell this story?”

The Real (Hi)Story

Most long-lived companies develop a very strong corporate culture that’s reflected in the material culture they produce, like marketing collateral, T-shirts, awards, etc. (SWAG, anyone?) We collect these things because they encapsulate the spirit of the company and the uniqueness of the innovation environment.

For VMware, the spirit of innovation is found in the form of a block. The earliest concept of the virtual machine was as a hardware block (a CPU) divided into virtual blocks (virtual machines). Employees receive glass blocks for their 4th, 8th, and 12th anniversaries. We’ve collected these, along with boxes and discs of VMware’s early products.

Glass cubes awarded to employees on their 4th anniversary with VMware. Catalog number 102801292.

VMware’s creative and passionate spirit can be found in T-shirts featuring cheeky taglines and images; digital materials documenting VMware employee activities; and a crew of turtles who call the pond in VMware’s Palo Alto campus their home. We aren’t collecting the turtles, of course, but we will hold on to Rosie’s Turtle Tales, a book chronicling their adventures, along with representative sample of VMware SWAG.

Hardback book titled Rosie’s Turtle Tales, by Cathy Luo, illustrated by Chelsea Wilson, 2019. Catalog number 102801296.

T-shirt designed by VMware with a graphic design showing network components and that reads “Liberation Through Virtualization.” Catalog number 102801297.

All of these things are fun and interesting, but they only tell part of the story. The real manifestation of the culture is in the people who have made VMware’s history through their work. We must collect their memories too.

I’ve had the privilege to interview 21 current and former VMware employees from all areas of the company and all regions of the world. I’ve learned a lot about VMware’s groundbreaking innovations, their worldwide impact, and the culture that made it all possible.

The author with Ganesh Venkitachalam, VP of Engineering & Product Management, Cloud Storage and Data Protection, VMware for his interview on September 12, 2023.

On Innovation

On Strong Leadership and Strong Core Values

On Lasting Impact

We invite you to explore the VMware Founders Collection here, including my interviews with VMware employees. More material will be added in the coming months. And CHM curators will be conducting full-length oral history interviews with some of VMware’s most important contributors.

It has been a real pleasure for me to get to know VMware—its technologies, its culture, and most of all its people around the globe. I would like to thank Amy Plunkett, Director—Global Communications, for being my guide and partner in building the VMware Founders Collection.

See more VMware artifacts in the VMware Founders Collection. If you have materials (or memories) related to VMware, please reach out to us at vmware-history@computerhistory.org.

Main image: VMware book titled “Who We Are, 2013/2014.” Catalog number 102801295.

SUPPORT CHM’S MISSION

Preserving collections like these would not be possible without the generous support of people like you who care deeply about computing history. Please consider making a donation.

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ERMA was the absolute beginning of the mechanization of business.

— Thomas Morrin, SRI Director of Engineering

On May 17, the Computer History Museum received a very special artifact for its permanent collection. This object, a highly-specialized computer system, rescued Bank of America—indeed the entire American banking industry—from being buried under an avalanche of paper and marked the earliest large-scale use of computers in business. The machine was called ERMA: the Electronic Recording Machine, Accounting, and the system came from the Bank of America building in Concord, California, where it had proudly been on display for several decades.

ERMA display at Bank of America’s Concord campus. Only the major parts of ERMA were preserved. Photo by Aurora Tucker.

Recently arrived ERMA units at CHM’s environmentally controlled storage facility. Photo by Aurora Tucker.

ERMA’s Story

Before the mid-twentieth century, banking was a time-consuming, manual process. Deposits and withdrawals were recorded by hand, and account balances were calculated using mechanical adding machines. An experienced bookkeeper could post 245 bank accounts in an hour—about 2,000 in an eight-hour workday, or approximately 10,000 per week. (Even today, despite new payment systems like Venmo and Paypal, the average American writes 38 checks per year.) The system was prone to errors, and transactions could take days to process. And, because communication and record-keeping were largely done on paper, banks were limited in their ability to serve any but local customers.

Amy Weaver Fisher and James L. McKenney, “The Development of the ERMA Banking System: Lessons From History,” IEEE Annals of the Historv of Computing, Vol 15, no. 1, (1993): 45.

After WW II, a booming middle class placed huge demands on American banks. At Bank of America (BofA), checking accounts were growing at a rate of 23,000 per month and branches had to close every day at 2 or 3:00 p.m. to handle the paperwork for that day. Even as early as 1948, the bank was processing over two billion checks per year.

ERMA was designed and built in mid-century. Note the atomic and “space-age” themes. https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/2023/04/102726943-05-01-acc.pdf

Bank of America, called Bank of Italy until 1930, was founded in 1904 by A.P. Giannini as a small neighborhood bank in San Francisco’s North Beach district. The bank‘s philosophy was to provide banking services to those not traditionally served by local banks, like immigrants and new small business owners. The bank’s success was phenomenal. By the end of 1941, Bank of America boasted 495 branches and $2.1 billion in assets. During World War II, California’s population and economy mushroomed, boosting Bank of America’s resources to more than $5 billion, more than any commercial bank in the world.

Preparing ERMA’s sorter for transport while A.P. Giannini looks on. Photo by Aurora Tucker.

Given this growth, and the expected growth in bank accounts after the War, BofA Vice President S. Clark Beise went to business machine companies like IBM and Burroughs to see if they could design a solution. But, these companies were not interested. Beise then approached the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in Menlo Park, California, about applying automated methods to the problem, and they agreed to explore possible solutions. The proposed system was called ERMA and took some seven years of development to complete.

Led by SRI’s director of engineering, Thomas H. Morrin, ERMA’s development was a complex undertaking that involved multiple teams and disciplines. On the BofA side, Al Zipf headed the equipment research department and coordinated development of important subsystems, including MICR. At its core, ERMA was a combination of hardware and software that automated banking operations. The hardware included a magnetic ink character recognition (MICR) system that could read information encoded on checks, a high-speed printer and sorter for check processing, and a computer to process transactions.

ERMA’s high-speed sorter. Built by GE in partnership with National and Pitney-Bowes. Photo by Aurora Tucker.

A major challenge was developing the software to process transactions. The team had to design a system that could handle millions of transactions per day, while ensuring that account balances were accurate and up-to-date. They accomplished this by using a combination of processing methods. Batch processing was used to process transactions in large groups, while real-time processing was used for high-priority transactions, such as those involving large sums of money. Interestingly, future AI pioneer Joseph Weizenbaum was on the ERMA software team, just a few years prior to writing his famous (and controversial) ELIZA chatbot program.

ERMA tape drives. Originally made by Potter Instruments. Photo by Aurora Tucker.

Though development was ongoing, the first ERMA prototype was ready by 1952, and by 1955, the design was established. SRI and BofA then looked for a vendor to build multiple ERMA systems (there would be 33 in total), and GE won the contract. Re-implemented using transistors by the newly formed General Electric Computer Department, ERMA was officially launched in 1959, after seven years of development. (The vacuum tube prototype was quietly donated to the engineering school of Arizona State University). Over the next two years, an additional 32 systems were installed, and by 1966, 12 regional ERMA centers served all but 21 of Bank of America’s 900 branches. Handling more than 750 million checks a year, the new ERMA was an immediate success. Within just a couple of years, it had shown the entire banking industry a new way of doing business.

ERMA was introduced to the world in September 1955 by future American president Ronald Reagan.

The SRI ERMA Development Team, c. 1950s. https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/2023/04/102783425-05-01-acc.pdf

By 1961, ERMA was handling 2.3 million accounts. The system was eventually able to read ten checks a second, with errors on the order of 1 per 100,000 checks. ERMA contained more than a million feet of wiring, 5 input consoles with MICR readers, 2 magnetic memory drums, the check sorter, a high-speed printer, a power control panel, a maintenance board, 24 racks holding 1,500 electrical packages and 500 relay packages, and 12 magnetic tape drives for 2,400-foot tape reels.

ERMA’s Impact

ERMA sped up processing by 80%, handling 33,000 accounts in the time it would take a human teller to process 250—and did it without error. The system relied on a clever encoding system: by writing the three important numbers required to process a check (bank routing number, the customer’s account number, and the check number) using a special magnetic ink at the bottom of every check, ERMA could instantly get the relevant information for the transaction. Magnetic ink was chosen to provide resistance against smudging or wrinkling of the check, and the system—called Magnetic Ink Character Recognition—was quickly adopted by the American Banking Association as a standard. Soon all banks were using the MICR system invented for ERMA. Take a look at one of your checks today: the MICR characters are still there.

Modern check showing MICR characters at bottom.

In the 1970s, BofA offered a credit card linked to customer checking accounts, another first and so ERMA was also a precursor to modern electronic banking and credit card systems. More generally, ERMA demonstrated the potential of electronic data processing for banking transactions, got GE into the computer business, and was one of the earliest successful large-scale application of computers to business anywhere. Given that at the time the project started, electronic digital stored-program computers were less than five years old, ERMA was incredibly ambitious.

Today, electronic banking is a ubiquitous part of our lives—we can even use our smartphones to transfer money, pay bills, and check our account balances. When we take photos of our checks for mobile deposit, our smartphones read the MICR characters. ERMA’s legacy is still with us.

Main image: ERMA graphic from Bank of America publicity brochure, https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/2023/04/102726943-05-01-acc.pdf

Learn more about ERMA

1. A Survey of Digital Computers, Ballistic Research Laboratory, 1961, GE 100 ERMA, p. 263 ff.

2. Interview with Dr. Robert Johnson, Manager, GE Computer Department, Annals of the History of Computing, vol 12, no. 2, 1990, pp.130-137.

3. SRI Alumni Hall of Fame: https://srialumni.org/halloffame-archive.html

4. Woodbury, David, O., Let ERMA Do it: The Full Story of Automation, New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1956.

5. Fisher, A. W., and McKenney, J. L., “The development of the ERMA banking systems: lessons from history,” Annals of the History of Computing, vol. 15, no. 1, 1993, pp. 44-57.

6. Head, R.V., “ERMA’s lost battalion,” Annals of the History of Computing, vol. 23, no. 3, pp. 64-72.

7. 1955 SRI newsletter, Research for Industry: http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/SRI_Newsletter_Oct55-1.pdf

8. GE Computer, GE 210 ERMA: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QfHMu75cfjg

9. Kim, H. Hannah, ERMA’s Whiz Kids: https://increment.com/teams/ermas-whiz-kids/

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We use software as an engine to power and move our digital world. We create software from code, that is, special languages that we can read and write, and that determine what computers and digital technologies actually do. Writing code is an art, a creative human activity undertaken by both individuals and by teams, and by using sophisticated tools. The code that people create can be art in another sense also: For those who are familiar with these special languages, they can see beauty within it, much as we all can appreciate the design of a stunning garden or public park.

The Computer History Museum invites you to accompany us for a year-long tour through this Art of Code, with many opportunities to explore remarkable stories, events, and historical source code releases. We will hear from experts and luminaries about how software is created and the important consequences it has for society. We will have a chance to explore, firsthand, the source code behind major developments in computing. And we will have a chance to engage in discussions about critical issues today and their relationship to code.

Here’s a sample of the “Art of Code” you can find at CHM.

A cassette containing the source code for Apple II DOS. In 2013, CHM released the code.

A set of floppy disks for MS-DOS 2.0. In 2014, CHM released the source code for Microsoft’s MS-DOS 1.1 and 2.0.

In 2017, CHM opened Make Software, Change the World! a 6,000 square foot exhibition that explores how the lives of people everywhere have been transformed by software.

What’s In Store

To preview for you just some of the coming year’s offerings for the Art of Code, we marked the 50th anniversary of the breakthrough software language and environment, Smalltalk, in September 2022. Smalltalk embraced a fresh, modular, and dynamic approach to the art of code called object-oriented programming. It was also a major step in the use of computers by children. The reverberations of each are still felt today. You can watch the full program here and read a blog recap here.

In October 2022, we celebrated this year’s new CHM Fellows who all have made remarkable contributions to the art of code, from Smalltalk to the pathbreaking Plato system of online communities, learning, and collaboration, and also to the development of the internet itself. Watch the full program here and read a blog recap here.

Available both for the IBM PC and the Apple Macintosh, in its heyday Eudora had tens of millions of users. In 2018, CHM released the Eudora email client source code.

Ken Thompson (seated) and Dennis Ritchie (standing) with the DEC PDP-11 to which they migrated the UNIX effort in 1971. In 2019, CHM released the source code for the earliest version of UNIX. Credit: Collection of the Computer History Museum, 10268544.

Source Code Releases

For programmers, developers, coders, and other students of code, we will begin a remarkable series of historical source code releases over the year. We will begin with the public release of the source code for PostScript, the innovative software behind printing as we know it, the rise of Adobe, and PDF. Closely following will be CHM’s public release of the source code for the Apple Lisa computer, a remarkably influential project by Apple that did so much to bring the graphical user interface and “What You See is What You Get” approaches into personal computing. It is still our primary way of interacting with digital technology forty years later.

Children animating horses in Smalltalk-72 on an Alto computer. In 2020, CHM began hosting the Smalltalk Zoo, a collection of historical versions of Smalltalk from 1972 to 1995 in an in-browser emulation. Credit: Courtesy of the PARC Library. © PARC. CHM Object ID 500004466

Later in the year, look for a events and offerings marking the 50th anniversaries of some of the pathbreaking developments in networked personal computing at Xerox PARC: The revolutionary Xerox Alto system and the era-defining network technology of Ethernet. CHM will also be releasing a digital archive of PARC’s extraordinary historical contributions, including source code, documents, images, and more. Sign up for our mailing list to stay informed.

Sign up!

Please join us for this Art of Code journey by signing up here for news and updates and begin your own journey through our existing Art of Code resources by watching this movie, exploring this playlist of CHM’s historical source code releases, by visiting Make Software and Revolution online. Learn more about the Art of Code at CHM.

Main image credit: Early MacPaint drawing by Susan Kare. In 2010, CHM released the MacPaint and Quickdraw source code. Credit: Apple, Inc.

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For five summer days in 1976, the first generation of computer rock stars had its own Woodstock. Coming from around the world, dozens of computing’s top engineers, scientists, and software pioneers got together to reflect upon the first 25 years of their discipline in the warm, sunny (and perhaps a bit unsettling) climes of the Los Alamos National Laboratories, birthplace of the atomic bomb.

After a multi-year recovery and restoration process, the Computer History Museum is delighted to announce it is making available 21 never-before-seen video recordings of this unique conference. You can watch them here.

See the photo in its original size in a PDF here. Los Alamos Conference Attendees, Los Alamos, NM, 1976. https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102695546

Legend for the Los Alamos Conference photo above, 1976.

List for the Los Alamos Conference Legend, 1976.

Continuation of the list for the Los Alamos Conference Legend, 1976.

In its early years (1950s and ‘60s), computing was a field wide open for exploration. Since so much was new, innovators building computers in this period of early discovery often invented things of permanent, lasting value to computing—either in hardware or software. Engineer Bob Everett’s remarks on the legendary MIT Whirlwind computer describes MIT’s 1952 perfection of magnetic core memory—thereby solving the single biggest bottleneck facing early computer designers. (Before magnetic core memory, there was no reliable, electronic, digital, random-access memory for building computers with, retarding any further progress until solved).

Conference speakers remembered these innovations, still in recent memory, leaving behind a one-of-a-kind record of why these early pioneers did what they did and why. Many of the machines in this first generation—17 of them were based upon the Institute for Advanced Study parallel binary architecture—were discussed at the conference: ENIAC, EDVAC, SEAC, SWAC, MANIAC, and ORACLE, among others. The remarkable thing these systems had in common was that they were essentially hand-built. The title of “programmer,” “systems analyst,” or other formal and now-familiar job titles did not exist: these machines were built by engineers, technicians, mechanics, and scientists for whom their often-finicky nature could be justified by the advanced calculations they performed. And nearly all of these early machines were “number crunchers”—designed for computation and solving advanced scientific and engineering problems. Setting the conference in Los Alamos was thus appropriate in a way, given the vast number of computations required in fulfilling the Labs’ wartime and later national security mission. Today, some of the most powerful supercomputers in the world are at the Labs.

Typical of computers of this generation, the 1946 ENIAC, the earliest American large-scale electronic computer, had to be left powered up 24 hours a day to keep its 18,000 vacuum tubes healthy. Turning them on and off, like a light bulb, shortened their life dramatically. ENIAC co-inventor John Mauchly discusses this serious issue.

Every concert has its high point… when Jimi Hendrix sets his guitar on fire or Pete Townshend shoves his guitar into a waiting amplifier. The Los Alamos peak moment was the brilliant lecture on the British WW II Colossus computing engines by computer scientist and historian of computing Brian Randell. Colossus machines were special-purpose computers used to decipher messages of the German High Command in WW II.

Based in southern England at Bletchley Park, these giant codebreaking machines regularly provided life-saving intelligence to the allies. Their existence was a closely-held secret during the war and for decades after. Randell’s lecture was—excuse me—a bombshell, one which prompted an immediate re-assessment of the entire history of computing. Observes conference attendee (and inventor of ASCII) IBM’s Bob Bemer, “On stage came Prof. Brian Randell, asking if anyone had ever wondered what Alan Turing had done during World War II? From there he went on to tell the story of Colossus—that day at Los Alamos was close to the first time the British Official Secrets Act had permitted any disclosures. I have heard the expression many times about jaws dropping, but I had really never seen it happen before.”

Publishing these original primary sources for the first time is part of CHM’s mission to not only preserve computing history but to make it come alive. We hope you will enjoy seeing and hearing from these early pioneers of computing. Leave us a comment below. We’d love to hear from you.

See all the videos on this playlist.

Dig Deeper

1. Williams, M.R., “The First Public Discussion of the Colossus Project,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, Volume: 40, Issue 1, Jan.–Mar. 2018
   https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8356174
2. B. Randell, “The Colossus”, in A History of Computing in the Twentieth Century (N. Metropolis, J. Howlett and G. C. Rota, Eds.), pp.47–92, Academic Press, New York, 1980.
3. International Research Conference on the History of Computing [Review], Los Alamos, June 10-15, 1976, John G. Brainerd, Technology and Culture, Vol. 18, No. 2 (Apr., 1977), pp. 218-221: Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

SUPPORT CHM’S MISSION

Blogs like these would not be possible without the generous support of people like you who care deeply about decoding technology. Please consider making a donation.

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Margaret Hamilton is literally iconic. She is also intensely private, having never given a full-length interview about her life and career. That is, until now. That Margaret Hamilton was deservedly renowned for her achievements in computing is clear: In 2016, President Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and in 2017 she became a Fellow of the Computer History Museum.

That the software pioneer had moved from distinguished to iconic truly struck home for me in December, when I walked into the Smithsonian’s beautiful Arts and Industries building to see its newest exhibit, “FUTURES.” In this expansive exploration about imagining different futures for ourselves, now and in the past, one of the very first things a visitor encounters is a display about Margaret Hamilton and her remarkable contributions to the software of the Apollo Guidance Computer, which brought American astronauts safely back and forth to the surface of the Moon.

Margaret Hamilton as an icon for software and space achievement in the Smithsonian’s “FUTURES” exhibit, photographed in 2021. Photos by David C. Brock.

The photograph of her standing beside a tower of printouts of Apollo Guidance Computer source code has itself become an iconic image, widely used to illustrate many discussions of the history of women in computing. It is but a click away in the Wikimedia Commons for authors, photo editors, students, and exhibit designers alike.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Margaret_Hamilton_-_restoration.jpg#/media/File:Margaret_Hamilton.gif

This photograph and Hamilton’s persona as a symbol of technical achievement blend together in the iconography of a recent Lego toy set, “Women of NASA,” in which Hamilton was one of four featured figures.

A screenshot from the Lego website, March 2022.

The Computer History Museum has also played on Hamilton’s iconic status, incorporating her as an avatar guide in the Museum’s new Minecraft: Education Edition world, The Great Tech Story, drawing players into experiences about software.

A Remarkable Life

The roots of this iconography reach down into the remarkable history of Hamilton’s engagement with software starting in the 1950s. Her first exposure to programming came at MIT, where she programmed meteorological simulations for Professor Edward Lorenz, one of the foremost figures in the development of chaos theory. It is Lorenz who popularized the notion of the “butterfly effect,” the concept that a small difference can yield a huge change within certain systems, like the flap of a seagull’s wing causing a storm, or the flutter of a butterfly’s wing determining the path of a tornado.

From there, she became a contributor to the SAGE system at the Lincoln Laboratory, working on software to distinguish the radar signature of aircraft from electronic noise. It was a matter central to the US military’s Cold War effort. From SAGE, she joined the effort at MIT to build the software for the Apollo Guidance Computer. This software would eventually prove central to the astonishing success of the Apollo program and achieving the goal of landing a human on the Moon.

During her work on Apollo, Hamilton became highly attuned to issues of error and reliability in the Apollo Guidance Computer software. She and colleagues did a careful study of the software errors that had arisen, scrutinizing and categorizing them according to cause. Avoiding these errors by circumnavigating their causes became the focus of her career forever after. She founded two companies to pursue this work, leading the development of new formal methods and languages for creating error-free and reliable software and systems. She continues this work at the time of this writing.

The Oral History

Behind all this accomplishment and iconography stands a very real, and very private person. For someone who has devoted her professional life to avoiding error and building reliability, it would seem that the ambiguities of history, memory, and expression are not entirely comfortable. She rarely gives interviews or speaks publicly about herself. Or perhaps it is simply the fact that whatever she says, people will be listening closely. In any event, the Computer History Museum had the rare opportunity to record a lengthy oral history interview with Margaret Hamilton in connection with her 2017 CHM Fellows award. After careful review and annotation, the transcript and video of this oral history are now available online.

Below is a series of short selections from this oral history, highlights of Margaret Hamilton telling her remarkable story in her own words.

Math and Baseball

Abstract Thinking

Something Interesting

Earning It

A Smaller School

Crunching Numbers

Cucumber Sandwiches

“You Do It”

Poking Holes

Catching Hackers

Because You’re a Girl

The Seashore Program

Intrigued by Apollo

ForgetIt

Programming Priorities

Learning From Secretaries

Even Astronauts Make Mistakes

Emergency Landing

Control Theory

Somersault Lessons

We Have a Problem

Margaret Hamilton’s full oral history (see the transcript or the video) is part of the Computer History Museum’s Oral History Collection, an invaluable open resource of over 1,000 remarkable stories. To learn more about it, and to begin your own explorations, visit the collection.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Margaret Hamilton for her generosity of time and concern for this oral history, and to CHM’s Heidi Hackford and Max Plutte for their efforts on this blog post.

Support CHM’s Mission

Blogs like these would not be possible without the generous support of people like you who care deeply about decoding technology. Please consider making a donation.

Main Image Caption: Margaret Hamilton, delivering her acceptance speech for her 2017 CHM Fellows award.

The post Margaret Hamilton In Her Own Words appeared first on CHM.

For 35 years, the Churchill Club served as the premier thought-leadership forum in Silicon Valley. It was a place where entrepreneurs, investors, policymakers, academics, and business leaders could talk about important things—not only about what was happening in the tech revolution, but also in the economy, politics, foreign policy, health care, society, the environment, and more.  The club closed down in 2020, with CEO Karen Tucker citing increased competition and funding challenges brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, but its legacy lives on at the Computer History Museum, the new home of the Churchill Club archives. Thanks to CHM’s generous donors, decades of the club’s audio and video files, event photos, and newsletters will be preserved to serve as a touchpoint and a reminder for future generations.

Named after great orator Winston Churchill, the Club’s discussions were intended to foster innovation, economic growth, and social good. You can find 360 of the videos on CHM’s YouTube channel. (Not all of the 600 items in the collection are available on YouTube. They will, however,  all be cataloged so that researchers may make arrangements to access any item. Search for “Churchill Club” in the catalog.)

Speakers on the Churchill Club stage read like a “Who’s Who” of famous names—from ambassadors and politicians to business executives and movie stars. From IBM’s Ginny Rometty, Oracle’s Larry Ellison, and Microsoft’s Bill Gates to investors like Vinod Khosla and Mary Meeker, and to editor Arianna Huffington and former president George W. Bush, these were the people who could make things happen. Intel’s storied CEO Andy Grove made his last public appearance at the Churchill Club, and SAP’s Hasno Plattner and Marc Benioff, Salesforce founder, squared off in debate.

An Archive of Ideas

Along with conferences and roundtables, recurring events focused on trends and awards were perennial favorites. The annual “Churchills” featured awards for excellence in innovation, leadership, collaboration, and social benefit, for the purpose of inspiring others. Honorees were selected by the Churchill Club Academy, a group of over 700 innovation community members made up of industry leaders and professionals, entrepreneurs, investors, students, faculty, and members of the press.

One of the Churchill Club’s most anticipated events of the year was the Annual Top Ten Tech Trends debate. In 2015, for example, five venture capitalists explored AI, bitcoin, predictive software, new urbanization, the next transportation, and more. Do you think they got things right? Watch the video and see.

Setting the Record Straight

It’s rewarding for a Museum to see how their artifacts can correct the historical record. Already, the Churchill Club collection has restored the reputation of Ed Colligan, CEO of Palm, creators of an early smartphone called the Treo. Speaking to New York Times reporter John Markoff at the Churchill Club in 2006, Colligan supposedly laughed at the idea that a computer company like Apple would be able to enter the smartphone market with a decent product. His remarks were widely reported, and when the iPhone took the world by storm a year later, he was roundly mocked.

But, recently, the previously inaccessible original audio recording was made available to The Verge for research on a documentary on the Palm Handspring. In the recording, it’s very clear that Colligan was worried about competition from many sides, and while he noted that the smartphone space was technologically difficult, he did not predict that Apple would fail. Read the story. Join us for a screening of Springboard: The Secret History of the First Real Smartphone at CHM on May 6, 2022.

Forum for the Future

In 2011, CHM CEO Dan’l Lewin spoke at a Churchill Club event in his former role as a Microsoft VP. With other thought leaders, he shared insights about what it takes to drive innovation and transformational growth. Perhaps it was prophetic. Under his leadership, CHM is becoming a forum for thought leadership as the museum pursues its vision of “humanity forward.”

Thank You!

We are grateful to the following donors for their support of the Churchill Club archives at CHM.

Jonathan Becher
Richard and Elizabeth Brenner
Don Bulmer
Chris Byrne
Churchill Club
Doug Dawson
Rick DeGolia
The Draper Foundation
Joe and Lori Fabris
Helen Fanucci
Dan’l Lewin
Avery Lyford
Michael Maibach
Raymond G. Nasr
Dipchand Nishar
Christopher Sacca and Crystal English Sacca
Chris Stedman
Betty Taylor
Karen and Mark Tucker
Tom Vertin
John and Christine Walsh

Support CHM’s Mission

Blogs like these would not be possible without the generous support of people like you who care deeply about decoding technology. Please consider making a donation.

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Brothers and software entrepreneurs Stephan and William Adams created their own software company, Adamation, in the 1980s that was among the first to write consumer and custom enterprise applications software for Steve Jobs’ NeXT computer platform.

The older of the brothers, Stephan, was born in the neighborhood of Watts, Los Angeles, while William was born in Fullerton. To distance the family from the LA race riots, the boys’ mother moved to Placentia, California in Orange County, near Anaheim. A social worker, she raised the brothers and their sister on her own after their father, a boiler operator on Navy ships in World War II and a typewriter repairman, died when Stephan was in fifth grade.

A nearby uncle, who was an engineer working on the Minuteman ICBM project, introduced young William to computing through a Commodore PET home computer. William was academically bright, excelling in math, while Stephan was entrepreneurial at a young age, starting a business as a teen installing lawn sprinkler systems in the neighborhood, as well as taking up photography and sports. When he was cut from the high school baseball team despite being the best player, possibly due to his race, Stephan vowed always to be his own boss in the future, further cementing his entrepreneurial leanings. William went on to study electrical engineering and computer science at UC Berkeley, and Stephan joined him there as a junior college transfer, graduating with a degree in sociology.

Starting Adamation

At Berkeley, William worked at the campus computer store, and it eventually became a full-time job. This was in 1984-85, when the Macintosh began to make big inroads on campus and a growing community of Macintosh users centered in Berkeley emerged. Both Mac fans, the brothers admired Apple cofounder Steve Jobs and, with many of their peers at Berkeley and Stanford starting technology businesses, and companies like Adobe and Sun still in their infancy, it seemed only natural that they should start one too. While still students, they launched a two-man software company named Adamation in Oakland, with William writing the code and Stephan running the business. They started out by doing contract software jobs for the Macintosh.

As Black entrepreneurs with Berkeley educations, the Adams brothers experienced a complex combination of both structural discrimination and privilege as they started Adamation. One bank in Berkeley refused to let them open a bank account, even to deposit money. Fortunately they were able to open an account at a Black-owned bank. Nevertheless, their social connections at Berkeley stood them in good stead. Stephan’s involvement with Berkeley student activism introduced him to a local video production company that had offered the students pro-bono services. This relationship resulted in the company offering Adamation free or deferred rent on spare office space they had in Oakland.

The Silicon Valley “Meritocracy”

A key champion the brothers found was a White ally named Stuart Grady, who broke down the secret behind Silicon Valley’s “meritocracy.” To truly be successful in the Valley, Grady told them, one had to gain access to a rarified “5%” of elites that Grady believed ran the tech industry. If one could get into that 5%, in part through networking with the right people and being fortunate enough with timing and capital to enter into new markets as they were just starting, then race did not matter. But the barrier between those inside and outside the 5%, where most people of color are, is huge. The Adams brothers put this philosophy into practice with their decision to develop for Steve Jobs’ NeXT computer platform.

What NeXT?

When Steve Jobs left Apple in 1985, the Adams brothers decided their best bet to make it big would be to get in on the ground floor of whatever Jobs was doing. That turned out to be founding computer and software company NeXT. True to their word, the brothers were among the first to create custom software for Jobs’ new company, and Adamation received a major profile in the premier issue of NeXTWORLD magazine in 1991. Being an early adopter of NeXT and cultivating an important market relationship with Steve Jobs allowed the Adamses access to the Silicon Valley 5% elite and to parlay it into a profitable business, providing the foundation for the rest of their careers.

Profile on Adamation in the 1991 premiere issue of NeXTWORLD Magazine. Courtesy Stephan Adams.

Adamation’s first success was a contract to port the Ingres database for DEC systems to the NeXT platform. Ingres was a relational database system created by two Berkeley computer scientists and later commercialized. During the 1980s, Ingres was Oracle’s main competitor, and it later led to the development of Sybase, SQL, and PostgreSQL database technologies. Through his Berkeley connections, William had already gotten a contracting job with Ingres, and leveraged that into the NeXT porting contract, allowing them to beat Sybase and Oracle to market with the first relational database system on the NeXT.

Brochure advertising Adamation’s port of the INGRES database to NeXT computers. Courtesy Stephan Adams.

The Ingres database provided Adamation with a foundation upon which to build end-user applications for the NeXT: Who’s Calling?, a customer relations management package, What’s Happening?, a calendar application, and LiveWire, a local network live-chat app that was ahead of its time and was purchased by the CIA, among others. In addition, Adamation continued their contract development work, developing a custom solution for Alain Pinel, an upscale Silicon Valley realty, a key NeXT customer. Alain Pinel’s ambitious president wanted to put a computer on the desk of each of her realtors to increase their productivity and commissions. The custom software Adamation built for the company combined remote information retrieval with LiveWire instant messaging, predating the commercial internet. It was later copied and became the model for how realties run their operations today. Adamation also developed custom software for the William Morris talent agency, another key NeXT account. Stephan and William were doing mission-critical custom application development for NeXT as an enterprise platform years before NeXT itself pivoted to the strategy, allowing Adamation to survive when NeXT failed.

Brochure with timeline of Adamation history through 1994, highlighting LiveWire and customer Alain Pinel Realtors. Courtesy Stephan Adams.

Finding a Mentor

As NeXT struggled, Adamation pivoted to doing contract development for Taligent, a joint-Apple/IBM venture to produce a new object-oriented operating system. Taligent was also unsuccessful, however, and William eventually left to join former Apple executive Jean-Louis Gassée’s startup Be, Inc., which, like NeXT, was making a new, proprietary, graphical next generation computer system to compete with the Apple Macintosh. (Ultimately in late 1996 Be and NeXT would engage in a bakeoff to see which of their operating systems—and which company—would be purchased by Apple to replace the classic Mac OS. NeXT won, and Jobs and not Gassée returned to Apple. NeXTSTEP became the basis for Mac OS X and later iOS, and the rest is history. Read more about this, and what might have happened if NeXT had not won the bakeoff.)

Tearsheet from Taligent featuring Adamation. Courtesy Stephan Adams.

When William left, Stephan hired two new developers to create Personal Studio, an early video editing application for Gassée’s BeOS, and signed deals with various companies to sell rebranded and localized versions of its products in foreign countries. He also acquired venture capital funding from mentor Michael Fields, a Black technology executive-turned investor who had been president of Oracle USA. Fields helped Adams obtain a $12 million investment from HP. Unfortunately, after the dot.com crash of the early 2000s, HP cut its investment and the original incarnation of Adamation folded.

CD-ROM Cover for Personal Studio 1.5 beta for BeOS. Courtesy Stephan Adams.

William Goes to Microsoft

William, meanwhile, had left Be and taken a job at Microsoft, working initially in the XML team on the XSLT parser, and becoming a developer manager within a year, leading a team that eventually developed the SOAP toolkit and system.linq components of the .Net frameworks. After five years, William took a position in Engineering Excellence, moving to India to start the first incarnation of LEAP (Leap Engineering Acceleration Program), a five-week program to train new Indian engineering hires in the skills they needed to succeed at Microsoft and provide a community to improve retention rates.

After remarrying in India, William returned to the US during the 2008 financial crisis to work on the access control system for what would become Microsoft’s Azure cloud service, today Azure Active Directory (AAD). He worked on Linux for Azure just as Satya Nadella came on board as CEO. William then created the current incarnation of LEAP, whose purpose was to hire technical staff of diverse backgrounds from coding academies and train them with an onboard five-week program. This program was highly successful, and William joined the office of the CTO, Kevin Scott, as the first technical advisor, where he helped make the LEAP program a part of that office. William also helped to build a Microsoft engineering presence in Kenya and Nigeria. Today, he continues to help recruit, mentor, and train young hires, particularly those of minority backgrounds.

Stephan’s Next Steps

A few years after Adamation closed up shop, Stephan joined Michael Fields at KANA Software, an enterprise software company. He learned to do mergers and acquisitions, acquiring a company that today makes up the majority of KANA’s profits. He tried his hand at venture capital investing for a few years before relaunching Adamation in 2012 as a 3D printing company that sold 3D printed toys and other items to consumers. The lack of a market for 3D printed goods forced him to close in 2018. Today, Stephan is the CEO of a fiber optic company in the US Virgin Islands. His vision is to run an undersea cable connecting Africa to the US mainland through the Caribbean, which will help foster a technology sector in the islands.

On Race and Success in Silicon Valley

Stephan and William spoke insightfully about how race plays a factor in Silicon Valley. The brothers felt that they were able to succeed, in part, because they were so rare that they were not seen as threatening.

The new personal computing and software industry also needed good talent wherever it could be found and had not been around long enough to develop hardened biases. Jumping in on the ground floor of new platforms like NeXT, where there were low barriers to entry, helped the brothers get a foot in the door, as well as access to the 5% elite of Silicon Valley. Networking at Berkeley and finding mentors and supporters, both Black and White, was a key component of their success in making the most of opportunities when they arose.

Nevertheless, the brothers note that, despite their success, like other Black people in America, they are subject to systemic racism that could even endanger their lives. Today, both brothers are paying it forward to the next generation of Black engineers and entrepreneurs, William with his LEAP program at Microsoft, and Stephan with his work to connect Africa to the US through fiber optic networks.

Cover Image: Brothers Stephan Adams, Left, and William Adams, Right. Photo courtesy William Adams.

Watch the Oral Histories

Part 1

Part 2

Read the transcript.

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