Charlie Bourne was an expert in computerized search for 40 years before Google. CHM has recently finished cataloging his unique collection of materials documenting the history of online search and information systems from the 1950s onward, supported by a generous grant from the National Archives.
It's a Tuesday morning in 2037. You hurriedly brush your teeth and dress to meet the self-driving car arriving downstairs. As it pulls away from the curb, what world awaits?
On the evening of October 29, 1969, two young programmers sat at computer terminals 350 miles apart: Charley Kline at UCLA and Bill Duvall at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in Northern California.
2019 is a year of many web and networking anniversaries, or “netiversaries” to continue using an awful word. This year marks the 50th anniversary of general purpose computer networks. That first connection was over the ARPANET, between Douglas Engelbart’s laboratory at SRI and another node at UCLA. Such networks were b
Thirty years ago this month, physicist turned programmer Tim Berners-Lee first proposed what became the World Wide Web. A few months later he resubmitted the proposal with his colleague Robert Cailliau. Today the web is living up to its ambitious name, serving over four billion people with more to come.
His goal was building systems to augment human intelligence. His group prototyped much of modern computing (and invented the mouse) along the way.
Over the shortening fall days of 1977, an unmarked silver step van filled with futuristic equipment, shaggy-haired engineers, and sometimes fully uniformed generals quietly cruised the streets of the San Francisco Peninsula. Only an oddly shaped antenna gave a hint of its purpose.
2017 CHM Fellow Larry Roberts (1937–2018) is honored for his seminal contributions to the evolution of our connected world. Following his early work in computer graphics and networking he was chief architect of the ARPANET, the US Department of Defense network that was a key building block of the later Internet. He wa
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.
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
