[Air-l] Re: PCs were invented in 1968

David Brake david.brake at cfrq.net
Sun Sep 12 07:57:17 PDT 2004


I have an over-stocked browser bookmark database (5736 sites and rising) -
here are some more possibly useful references.

http://www.computerchronology.com/ gives a fancy multimedia timeline.
http://www.dejavu.org/ is a cute simulation of what the web looked like in
the browsers of the time.
You might find some useful raw materials at
http://www.stanford.edu/group/itsp/ and you could mine the links at
http://vmoc.museophile.org/ - The Virtual Museum of Computing.
The Charles Babbage Institute seems to have a lot of the original
documentation http://www.cbi.umn.edu/
http://www.computerhistory.org/ is the site of the Computer Museum at
Mountainview California which has some timelines etc of its own.

For an entertaining (but probably biased) read that could be usefully
critiqued in a serious discussion of the origins of the personal computer,
you might want to look at Cringely, R. X. (1996) Accidental Empires : How
the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign
Competition, and Still Can't Get a Date, (Rev. 2nd) Penguin, London. It
was used by the Open University for their first year course when I taught
it in 2000.

There are two companion sites for it - http://www.pbs.org/nerds/ and
http://www.pbs.org/opb/nerds2.0.1/ - the latter bringing the programme up
to date with the Internet (as of 1998). You might be able to get the
series on tape for students to watch as well.
-- 
David Brake, PhD researcher in Media and Communications, London School of
Economics & Political Science
<http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/media@lse/study/mPhilPhDMediaAndCommunications.htm>
Also see http://davidbrake.org/ (home page) and http://blog.org/ (weblog)
Author of Dealing With E-Mail - <http://davidbrake.org/dealingwithemail/>
gives ordering info




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