Computers & Business Machines - Overview
Imagine the loss, 100 years from now, if museums hadn't begun preserving the artifacts of the computer age. The last few decades offer proof positive of why museums must collect continuously—to document technological and social transformations already underway.
The Museum's collections contain mainframes, minicomputers, microcomputers, and handheld devices. A Cray2 supercomputer is part of the collections, along with one of the towers of IBM's Deep Blue, the computer that defeated reigning champion Garry Kasparov in a chess match in 1997. Other artifacts range from personal computers to ENIAC, the Altair, and the Osborne 1. Computer components and peripherals, games, software, manuals, and other documents are part of the collections. Some of the instruments of business include adding machines, calculators, typewriters, dictating machines, fax machines, cash registers, and photocopiers
"Computers & Business Machines - Overview" showing 3 items.
Jack Kilby's Integrated Circuit
- Description (Brief)
- Jack Kilby’s demonstration of the first working integrated circuit (IC) in 1958 revolutionized the field of microelectronics. Instead of using discrete transistors, resistors, and capacitors to form a circuit, Kilby’s IC design integrated a transistor, a capacitor, and the equivalent of three resistors all on the same chip. Kilby fabricated three types of circuits to test his idea: a flip flop, a multi vibrator and a phase shift oscillator. This chip is the phase-shift oscillator.
- The first IC was made out of a thin slice of germanium (the light blue rectangle) as a bulk resistor and contained a single bipolar transistor (under the large aluminum bar in the center). It had four input/output terminals (the small vertical aluminum bars), a ground (the large bar on the far right), and wires of gold. The microchips of today have been improved by hundreds of innovations, but Kilby’s prototype was an important early step.
- date made
- 1958
- maker
- Texas Instruments
- Kilby, Jack S.
- ID Number
- 1987.0487.320
- accession number
- 1987.0487
- collector/donor number
- G00012
- catalog number
- 1987.0487.320
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center
Integrated Circuit with Chip Art
- Description (Brief)
- Integrated circuits consist of electric components such as transistors, resistors, capacitors, and metallic interconnects manufactured at a nanometer scale on a silicon chip. Chip designers are constantly seeking to pack more components into less space making the engineering requirements of chip design almost an art. In the 1970s and early 1980s design engineers began to personalize their chip designs by leaving microscopic images etched inside the chips’ functioning design. These images took a variety of forms; company logos, funny animals, comic characters, or inside jokes between the engineering team. This hidden art helped to show that chip layers were correctly aligned and could prove that a competitor had stolen a chip design. Once chip designs were covered by copyright in 1984, chip art became a way for engineers to assert their individuality into the mass production of chip manufacturing.
- This 21msp50/55/56 digital signal processor chip was created by Analog Devices Incorporated around 1994. The chip contains an image of a fire-breathing Godzilla.
- date made
- ca 1994
- maker
- Analog Devices, Inc.
- ID Number
- 1996.3017.32
- nonaccession number
- 1996.3017
- catalog number
- 1996.3017.32
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center
Western Union Telegraph Ticker Receiver
- Description
- This Western Union Telegraph Company stock ticker was produced during the early 20th century. The ticker received stock information via a telegraph line and printed out a company’s abbreviated name and stock price on the spool of paper tape. After the Civil War, the volume of stocks traded rose sharply with American corporations’ need for investment capital. The 1867 invention of the stock ticker, transmitting up-to-the-minute share prices over telegraph lines, helped modernize the stock exchange.
- ID Number
- EM*332283
- accession number
- 294351
- catalog number
- 332283
- collector/donor number
- 100-772
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center