computer history museum
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Microsoft makes MS-DOS and Word for Windows source code public
Microsoft believes the children are our future, and to prove it, it's teamed up with the Computer History Museum to make source code available for two groundbreaking programs: MS-DOS and Word for Windows. In a blog post that outlined the deal, Roy Levin, managing director of Microsoft Research, said the company granted the museum permission to make the code public for MS DOS 1.1 and 2.0 and Microsoft Word for Windows 1.1a, "... to help future generations of technologists better understand the roots of personal computing." MS DOS, originally code named "Chess," took root in 1980 when IBM asked Microsoft to produce an OS to run on its computers. Word for Windows was released in 1989, and with in four years had captured half of the revenue of the word-processing market, according to Levin. Both programs marked the beginnings not only of great successes for Microsoft, but also the PC industry as we know it today. The museum's Chairman, Len Shustek, had this to say about the effort: "We think preserving historic source code like these two programs is key to understanding how software has evolved from primitive roots to become a crucial part of our civilization." The move marks an ongoing effort to make landmark software code available to the public; the museum released the source for the 1989 version of Photoshop early last year.
Watch Steve Jobs demonstrate the first Mac back in 1984
It's been 30 years since Apple first launched the Macintosh, and this week has been littered with clever tributes to the computer. Members of the Boston Computer Society, however, have unearthed a big treasure in the history of the machine. A week after a bow tie-sporting Steve Jobs famously pulled the machine out of a bag at the company's shareholder meeting, the CEO made a second presentation at Boston's John Hancock Hall. The clip hasn't been shown off publicly for the better part of 30 years, but has now been archived at the Computer History Museum. While the original remains the first unveiling of the unit, this 96-minute clip offers new insight into how users, rather than shareholders, embraced the computer at its launch.
Photoshop 1.0 source code now available from the Computer History Museum
The Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif. (home of Google, and just a few miles from Apple's HQ in Cupertino) has a new display up, featuring none other than the source code to Photoshop 1.0, the very first version of Adobe's powerhouse photo-editing software. The exhibit features 128,000 lines of code, which make up the initial release of Photoshop, for Mac computers back in ye old early computer days of 1989. Photoshop represents one of the very first, and most successful graphical interfaces, which of course the Mac platform is known for innovating. You can not only see the exhibit at the Computer History Museum itself, but you can also download the source code on your own over the Internet -- as long as you agree to a 1,400-word license. At any rate, it's nice to have this little piece of GUI history archived and remembered in this way.
Daily Update for February 15, 2013
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Photoshop v1.0.1 released free to everyone, including Australians
Our Antipodean chums might be getting a raw deal on modern versions of Photoshop, but at least they can try 1989's vintage without paying. The Computer History Museum, with Adobe's permission, has released the source code to version 1.0.1 free to citizens of the world, just as it did with MacPaint back in 2010. It's just a shame that current CEO Shantanu Narayen isn't feeling so generous to those on the southern hemisphere.
Visualized: the iPad that never was, complete with camera and wireless
If you're an Apple lover, you've probably heard of the Newton PDA, and there are probably even PenLite enthusiasts among the hardcore, but this is a tablet we've never seen: the Apple Vademecum. Marcin Wichary of the Computer History Museum (and Google Pac-Man fame) somehow got a hold of two piecemeal prototypes to take some fantastic shots, showing off their transparent construction, ribbon cables, and in this case an ancient webcam and integrated Ricochet wireless modem. Wichary claims the project was started in 1994 at Apple's Advanced Technology Group with touchscreen -- not pen-based -- computing in mind, and would have used a special MacOS designed for tablets rather than an extension of Newton. May it rest in piece. [Thanks, Nikolai]
Computer History Museum makes original MacPaint source code available to public
With all the tricky Photoshoppery we do 'round these parts, it's easy to forget that once the only way to get Justin Bieber into a shot with Steve Jobs and Bill Atkinson involved an X-Acto knife and rubber cement. For a peek into that dark and distant time (the 1980s) check out the Computer History Museum website, which has recently posted the source code for both MacPaint 1.3 and the QuickDraw graphics library. It's pretty amazing to consider that software this cutting edge consisted of a single, 5,822 line Apple Pascal file (in conjunction with another whopping 3,583 lines of code in assembly language). If poring over twenty-six year old code isn't your bag, the museum's website also contains an oral history of the development of MacPaint and more. Hit the source link to check it out.
Computer History Museum unboxes a Babbage difference engine
Not too many people go to science museums and place orders, but former Microsoft CTO Nathan Myhrvold was apparently so impressed with the London Science Museum's replica of Charles Babbage's difference engine he commissioned a $1M duplicate, which was just recently delivered to California's Computer History Museum for a six-month stay. The nine-foot-tall machine has nearly 8,000 parts, many of which were hand-filed, and suffered months of delays while under construction due to the tight tolerances required to make it work -- but it's here now, and it's ready to start cranking out polynomials at the rate of one per six seconds. Bring it on, IBM. Check the read link for way more pics of the unboxing, which took hours and ended in applause.
