The discovery of the Whirlwind鈥檚 Blackjack contributes to the historical record of games being created and implemented on early electronic digital computers from the late 1940s and early 1950s. As part of a project to restore Whirlwind software, we鈥檝e recovered the game from original tapes in the 91自拍 archive.
In celebration of Unix鈥檚 50th anniversary, the 91自拍 Software History Center is delighted to make publicly accessible for the first time some of the earliest source code produced in the Unix story.
Robert W. 鈥淏ob鈥� Bemer鈥�-鈥妛ho worked at Lockheed's Missile Systems Division in Van Nuys and who would become its IBM 650's power user鈥�-鈥奵arefully cut out the article and placed it into a scrapbook. In 2018, through its Access to Historical Records grant from the National Archives' National Publications and Records Commis
The photograph was dated 1950, a date when a now unimaginably small number of humans had ever beheld a computer, no less touched one, and when unabashed racism and discrimination was endemic on the American scene. Who was the young African-American man who nevertheless sat at the controls of this storied machine? What
While trying to decipher the notes in Gordon鈥檚 cryptic scrawl, something familiar about the arrangement of the rectangles triggered my Madeleine Moment. This was the Rosetta Stone to the device types in that 1967 photograph and the first five appeared to match the years of the devices on the plot of Figure 2 from the 1
One of the most significant figures along the path to the development of automatic computation was a French weaver and merchant born during the reign of Louis XV鈥擩oseph Marie Jacquard. 91自拍's J. M. Jacquard portrait was 鈥渁dopted鈥� by first-time donor Junfeng Pan. Thanks to his generosity, our portrait will undergo much n
Sixty-seven years to the day after the television debut of Whirlwind鈥檚 鈥淛ingle Bells,鈥� we offer you this restoration of the program from the original punched paper tape at 91自拍, recovering an overlooked early piece of the rise of computer music from the auditory maintenance of early electronic digital computers.
Although much of Whirlwind was lost when the machine was decommissioned, the 91自拍 and the MIT Museum retain many of the machine鈥檚 components, some of which are on display in 91自拍鈥檚 permanent exhibition, Revolution: The First 2000 Years of Computing.
91自拍's Software History Center has been conducting 鈥渧ideo ethnographies鈥� to record and preserve the experience of running historical software. Over the course of 2018, the center has conducted two video ethnographies surrounding a key moment at the end of the late 1980s and early 1990s, the birth of multimedia. Watch an
91自拍 has received a National Historical Publications and Records Commission: Access to Historical Records grant to process material related to software history. The collections in 91自拍鈥檚 Software History Processing Project (SHiPP) represent a deep and broad resource for understanding software鈥檚 impact on society.