Computer History Museum

This paper demonstrates the following points:

Presents information on the Computer History Museum.

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No abstract available.

The articles in this special section focus on the emergence and growth of desktop publishing. This is the third special issue that is devoted to the history of desktop publishing. The first issue appeared in the fall of 2018, and was about the developments in the 1960s and 1970s of computer-driven printing and the technologies that led to the commercial growth of the desktop publishing industry. The second issue, in the fall of 2019, continued the story by describing how those technologies, developed in the 1970s particularly at Xerox PARC, became the foundation for the growth of major desktop-publishing software companies, with articles by founders of Adobe, Aldus, Quark, Frame Technology, and Ventura. The prediction that computers would end the era of print publication goes as far back as Vannevar Bush’s 1945 Memex. The first two Annals special issues on desktop publishing have documented what happened instead, as computing became central to publishing. They were primarily about the technology and the companies that created the digital publishing industry and made it so popular. We continue that documentation in this issue, and also have two articles on the history of font design, which is central to all publishing, both traditional “hot-metal” and digital.

In 1985, Apple was in crisis and Macintosh and LaserWriter sales were plummeting. Marketing manager John Scull was tasked with saving the LaserWriter. Despite having no staff and facing resistance, Scull marshaled allies across Apple's sales and marketing organizations, its dealer channel, and third-party partners like Aldus and Adobe in order to launch a successful desktop publishing marketing program. By 1988, desktop publishing at Apple had become a $1 billion business.

John McCarthy designed the LISP programming language for the symbolic computation typical of artificial intelligence at the time, and LISP was strongly associated with AI at least through the 1990s. By 1963, a number of ideas had been proposed for how LISP 1.5 could be improved and extended. This lead to the LISP 2 project, which was carried out at System Development Corporation by personnel from SDC and Information International, Inc., using the military AN/FSQ-32 computer. LISP 2 extended LISP 1.5 with ALGOL-like syntax, static type checking, efficient support for arithmetic and arrays, pattern-matching, and more, but the LISP 2 language failed to displace LISP 1.5. Despite this, LISP 2 foreshadowed later languages, such as ECL, Common Lisp, and Java. An online archive of LISP 2 documents and source code exists at the Computer History Museum, providing a snapshot of mid-1960s ARPA-funded research and development.

ABSTRACTBoth the Internet and the Web beat out numerous rivals to become today's dominant network and online system, respectively. Many of those rival systems and networks had developed alternative solutions to issues that face us today, from micropayments to copyright. But few scholars, much less thought leaders, have a meaningful overview of the origins of our online world, or of the many systems which came before. This exclusivity is a problem, since as a society we are now making some of the permanent decisions that will determine how we deal with information for decades and even centuries to come. Those decisions are about regulatory structures, economic models, civil liberties, publishing and more. This essay argues for the need to comparatively study online information systems across all these axes, and to thus develop a “common language” of known precedents and concepts as a prerequisite for making informed discussions about the future of the online world. Doing so depends on two factors: (1) preservation of enough historical materials about earlier systems to be able to meaningfully examine them; (2) interdisciplinary, international attention to “meta” stories that emerge from considering the evolution of multiple networks and online systems.