Introduction to my Computer History blog

I am a software guy, I admit that, but I have also worked with Hardware, way back. The reason I say this is that most history on Computers are related to hardware, and there is some good reason this is so. Mainly, the history of computer hardware is older, much older, than the history on Software.

This said though, Software and the Software industry is old enough (speaking of software as an entity of it's own, not related to Hardware, it is approaching 50 years) to start telling the History of software.

But for myself, even though I am a Software guy, Computer Hardware has at the moment a much more intriguing and interesting history. Being a MySQLer though, I will make an attempt to blog about as much Software History as I can. And I can tell you I have a few interesting stories on the issue of computer, and computing, history up my sleeves, including Software history. But I am not a researcher in the field myself, I just read on stuff, as much as I can actually, and there are some good books on the history of software coming out.

What are my sources then? I try to collect and read as much as I can. IEEE publishes a magazine on computer history, and there are a bunch of books on the subject. Among the books, I can see three kinds of books that provide me with material:

• Books on the explicit subject of Computer History. This is obvious, and I have a bunch of these books.
• Books on specific attributes of computing. These are books that do not set out to document computer history, but do so anyway. Examples are books on .com era, books about the crypto computers during the war and books on the Unix crowd and other similar subjects.
• Thirdly, we have biographies and such books. Some of these are very specific, such as books on IBM, books about Eniac and on DEC, Sun etc.

All these books are valuable, I own a bunch of them and I like to read and talk on them. I am preparing a talk on Computer History now, and as this is still early days in this particular subject, and it is still difficult to see all the implications of what happened, I will present this in a different manner (a manner that suits blogging quite well, incidentally). I plan to have a script and a talk on a bunch of subjects, each talk around 20 minutes or so, and then provide these as mini-dramas. I know this might not be scientific for enough for everybody, but my aim is to make this interesting for a larger crowd, not to smooch a few scientists.

So, now you know what I am about to blog about here, broadly. And before I finish up, any stories, suggestions, facts, fun ideas etc. that you have on this subject, let me hear them, I am open for suggestion.

And before I leave you, I will end with a tip for my next blog post on this subject. Drugs, today, illegal, the US army and the completely insane and innocent view on the technology of the 1950's. That's a subject for you!

/Karlsson