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Charles Babbage's masterpiece difference engine comes to Silicon Valley

Update: This story has been corrected to reflect that the date of the public opening of the exhibit is May 10.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--"Excuse me, Richard, we have a very large parcel."

With those words, spoken by John Shulver of London's Science Museum, a day of supreme geekery unfolded at the Computer History Museum here.

To be precise, the package in question was the delivery and installation of a difference engine, a brand new model of a 19th-century-era machine designed--but never actually built--by Charles Babbage. It was designed to be a mechanical calculator which can … Read more

Vaporware: The tech that never was

Vaporware may sound like a technical term to describe the gradual corrosion of a kettle, but today we're using it to describe a product announced by a company with great fanfare, hoohah, and occasionally hullaballoo--but that never materializes.

Continual delays, setbacks, and excuses are the calling cards of a product that becomes vaporware. Windows Vista ran the risk of joining the club, and the terrific multiplayer first-person shooter Team Fortress 2 was in production for almost a decade before it was released in 2007. Devoted TF fans feared it would become a distinguished entrant in the who's who … Read more

Mozilla gunning for universal bookmarks and browsing history with project Weave

Mozilla's new project called Weave is an exciting new add-on to Mozilla's popular browser Firefox. While in its infancy, the service plans to be a way for users to save and access their personal browsing information across multiple machines. It's a little bit like Google's Web history, del.icio.us, and a Web password saver all wrapped up into one.

Some use cases for Weave (as listed by Mozilla) include: accessing your history and bookmarks from your home version of Firefox on your mobile Firefox browser, shared/collaborative bookmarking, and personalization tools to let you log … Read more

Simkl and IM History: Two services that spy on your IM conversations (for you)

The move to archive nearly everything we do online has been spearheaded mainly by Google in both Gmail as well as Google Web history. The same thing is happening in the chat space with Meebo and Google Talk, as well as desktop chat clients that have had integrated chat logging for years now. The one thing missing has been a way to take those locally saved conversations and make them available for search and reading while away from your home machine. IM History and Simkl are two companies have jumped on the task in an attempt to let people archive … Read more

AOL, Netflix and the end of open access to research data

Correction: The authors of the Netflix de-anonymization study contacted me to point out that they originally published a draft of their results a mere two weeks after Netflix released its dataset. Netflix has known about their study for over a year.

Over the past year, there have been a number of high-profile incidents in which sensitive user data was accidentally revealed to the Internet at large. As a result, I believe that high-tech companies will never again share anonymized data on their users with academic researchers, at least not without requiring contracts and nondisclosure agreements. For the users and privacy … Read more

An afternoon with Honda's Asimo robot

On Thursday afternoon I was back at the Computer History Museum. The Honda Research Institute was hosting its tenth Technical Horizon Symposium and announcing this year's Honda Initiation Grant awards.

The grants are part of the Institute's efforts to stimulate collaborate research between Honda and the academic community. Since 1997, Honda says it has awarded 75 grants totalling "several million dollars" to universities in the US. This year, Honda received 300 proposals; it chose seven. This year's awards (listed here along with those of past years) cover research in safety, efficiency, emissions control, and user … Read more

Open-source history: See Multics source code

In a move more likely to appeal to technology historians than coders, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has published the source code of Multics (Multiplexed Information and Computing Service), a precursor to the Unix operating system begun as a research project at the university in 1965.

The code is hosted on MIT's Multics Web site. MIT, General Electric, and Bell Labs worked to commercialize it, but Bell--originator of the more influential and still widely used Unix operating system--dropped out in 1969. Honeywell took over GE's computer business, and Honeywell became Bull, which donated the source code at the … Read more

The 10th Vintage Computer Festival passes into history

I had a great time over the weekend at the 10th Vintage Computer Festival, which took place in the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif.

In addition to the exhibits of vintage computers--including the largest collection of Radio Shack Pocket Computers I've ever seen--and the marketplace, where I managed to avoid buying any slide rules, Vectrix video games, or Cray supercomputer circuit boards--there were several notable presentations.

On Saturday, Tim McNerney spoke about his work to reimplement the Intel 4004 microprocessor, which led to a 130x-scale working model of the chip composed of individual transistors on a large … Read more

Make your plans for the Vintage Computer Festival 10.0

I've been to a lot of computer conferences over the last 30 years-- my first was the mainframe-oriented National Computer Conference in 1979, and I've probably been to 250 more since then-- but one of my favorites is also the smallest: the Vintage Computer Festival, hosted by Sellam Ismail.

Over the years at these conferences (a collection of my badges as of 1998 or so is shown here), and in my own life, I've seen and used an awful lot of computer hardware.

I'm surprised that some kinds of systems that were very popular in the … Read more

De.licio.us + Google Web History = Hooeey

Hooeey is a new bookmarking and tracking service for your browsing habits. You install a small toolbar in your browser, and it will quietly keep tabs on all your tabs, including which sites you're going to, how long you're staying at each one, and when you're doing it. At the same time, Hooeey adds a social networking layer, letting you share specific sites with others, both on the Hooeey network, and other, larger social bookmarking services like Del.icio.us and Reddit. The goal is to let you centralize your favorites, and make them easier to share … Read more