Resources

In the development of this archival collection, we consulted archival and insprational material online, including articles, images, podcasts and videos, as well as books in print.

Archival resources

• ArchiveGrid - ArchiveGrid includes over 7 million records describing archival materials, bringing together information about historical documents, personal papers, family histories, and more. With over 1,400 archival institutions represented, ArchiveGrid helps researchers looking for primary source materials held in archives, libraries, museums and historical societies.
• CHAP (Computer History Archives Project) - Vintage Computer Photo Gallery
• Computer History Museum Digital Archive Selling the Computer Revolution - Marketing Brochures in the Collection
• Creative Computing Magazine
• CUNY Minas Reed Library – Online Archival Research Guide - This page offers tips and suggestions for finding digitized primary sources in subscription databases and on the open web.
• Experimental Science and Cinema at The Museum of the Moving Image – interview with curators for “Computer Films of the 1960s” - In the 1960s, computer programmers at IBM, the MIT, and other research labs experimented with purely competer-generated films. Some of these works comprise “Computer Films of the 1960s ,” a 37-minute reel of psychedelic films currently at the Museum of the Moving Image. The exhibition is organized by guest curators Leo Goldsmith and Gregory Zinman; it features the work of Stan VanDerBeek, Kenneth Knowlton, A. Michael Noll, and John and James Whitney, among others. In 2013 Goldsmith and Zinman talked to Science & Film about these early collaborations between artists and scientists on the occasion of a program featuring many of these same films. An edited version of the interview follows, and you can read the full interview in the Science & Film archives.
• History and the Archive: Penn State University Archive Resource - Find resources for the history of advertising and archival information.
• IBM Mainframes Photo Album
• NYC Municipal Archives - Selected from the world-class historical collections of the Archives, most of these unique photographs, maps, documents, motion picture and audio recordings are being made accessible for the first time.
• NYPL Picture Collection - An unparalleled visual resource for creative people in any medium, the Picture Collection contains well over one million original prints, photographs, posters, postcards, and illustrations from books, magazines, and newspapers, classified into subject headings. 
• Radical Software - Radical Software was an early journal on the use of video as an artistic and political medium, started in 1970 in New York City. At the time, the term radical software referred to the content of information rather than to a computer program. Co-founded by Beryl Korot in 1970, it published critical pieces about how such technologies impact society. She graduated from Queens College in 1967 with a BA in English literature.
• Science70 - Results for posts tagged ‘computer’

Inspiration

• Computer History Museum - From the heart of Silicon Valley, we share insights gleaned from our research, our events, and our incomparable collection of computing artifacts and oral histories to convene, inform, and empower people to build a better world.
• Pinterest Board ‘Mainframes’ - A growing collection of historical mainframe photo. Please contribute with your photo (IBM, Amdhal, Hitachi, etc…)
• SuperCluster - Supercluster is focused on stories of spacecraft, astronauts, and space exploration. We create film, animation, photography, illustrations, podcasts, interactive experiences, and data visualizations. Through the Supercluster store we’ll offer space apparel, accessories, toys, scale models, posters, books and tools.
• Digital Dark Age Podcast - On this week’s episode of On the Media, we’re engaging in some chillingly informed speculation: what would happen if we, as a species, lost access to our electronic records? What if, either by the slow creep of technological obsolescence or sudden cosmic disaster, we no longer could draw from the well of of knowledge accrued through the ages? What if we fell into…a digital dark age?
• LongNow.org → Digital Dark Age Articles
• Mainframe History: How Mainframe Computers Have Changed Over the Years - Mainframes have one of the longest histories of any kind of computing technology that is still used today. In fact, mainframe history is far too long to pack into a single blog post, but we’re going to try anyway. Keep reading for a (very) brief history of mainframe computing.
• Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing - Matthew Kirschenbaum examines how the interests and ideals of creative authorship came to coexist with the computer revolution. Who were the first adopters? What kind of anxieties did they share? Was word processing perceived as just a better typewriter or something more? How did it change our understanding of writing?
• The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information - Knowledge work is now the reigning business paradigm and affects even the world of higher education. But what perspective can the knowledge of the humanities and arts contribute to a world of knowledge work whose primary mission is business? And what is the role of information technology as both the servant of the knowledge economy and the medium of a new technological cool? In The Laws of Cool, Alan Liu reflects on these questions as he considers the emergence of new information technologies and their profound influence on the forms and practices of knowledge.
• A Prehistory of the Cloud - The militarized legacy of the digital cloud: how the cloud grew out of older network technologies and politics.
• Kill It With Fire - “Kill it with fire,” the typical first reaction to a legacy system falling into obsolescence, is a knee-jerk approach that often burns through tons of money and time only to result in a less efficient solution. This book offers a far more forgiving modernization framework, laying out smart value-add strategies and proven techniques that work equally well for ancient systems and brand-new ones.
• Stan Vanderbeek - Collage artist that wanted to use mainframe computers to generate art.
• Journal des dames et des modes - Nice collection made with Wax library.
• Examples of people using Wax - Examples of people using Wax in the wild.
• The Early Years of Academic Computing - These reflections describe the early years of academic computing. It emphasizes the period from the 1960s to the 1990s when universities developed their own computing environments, with case studies based on personal experience at Dartmouth College and Carnegie Mellon University.