Ken Shirriff's blog

In 1962, the Simpson's department store in Toronto used an IBM computer to help customers select Christmas gifts, based on the charact...

How did computers implement logic gates in the 1950s? Computers were moving into the transistor age, but transistors were expensive so cir...

At the Computer History Museum , we recently obtained card decks for a 50-year-old computer music program. Back then, most computers didn&#...

Have you ever wondered why 132 characters is such a common width for printers? Many printers produced lines of 132 characters, such as the g...