During my recent visit to the English department at the University of Minnesota I had a chance to spend some time at the Charles Babbage Institute. The CBI collects papers, correspondence, manuals, technical reports, and other forms of documentation from the history and material culture of computing. They do not collect hardware, nor do they seek to preserve data and software.
The William Blake Archive has its project records on deposit at CBI.
While I was there I chatted with one of the archivists, Elisabeth Kaplan, and also had a chance to examine some primary source material: a technical manual describing a library automation system for the RAMAC 305 (first IBM hard drive) and a white paper on storage technologies ca. 1955. Interestingly, the cathode ray tube (known to most of us as the basis of monitor display technology) was once a storage device.
CBI is also home to Iterations, a peer-reviewed journal of software history, and the Software History Dictionary—both resources I suspect I’ll be coming back to.
Posted by mgk at April 25, 2004 08:38 PM