Dan Kohn's Blog

If you could not tell, I was recently in California for the 2023 Cisco Networking Academy Partner & Instructor Conference. While there, I also was able to visit the Computer History Museum (CHM) and scratch it off my bucket list.

I have posted a number of the videos from the museum in posts below, but I also wanted to post a few pics that I took while there:

Above is me with “Shakey”, one of the first autonomous path finding robots. I remember watching a NOVA on this robot and now I work with robots! Couldn’t resist taking this photo!

For those into computer history, you will probably recognize two panels from ENIAC, one of the first all electronic computers. Again being a computer history geek, I couldn’t help but to take a picture!

If you are ever in Mountain View, CA and are a computer nerd like me, I strongly encourage you to go to this museum and see it for yourself. I actually went through the exhibits three times and saw something I missed each time! This is geek heaven! I just wish the IBM 1401 and PDP-1 Demos were live when I visited (but it was still neat seeing these old restored computers).

Can’t get to the Computer History Museum to see the exhibit in person. Click HERE to go through the exhibit virtually.

Discover a fascinating look into the lives of six historic trailblazers in this World War II-era story of the American women who programmed the world’s first modern computer.

After the end of World War II, the race for technological supremacy sped on. Top-secret research into ballistics and computing, begun during the war to aid those on the front lines, continued across the United States as engineers and programmers rushed to complete their confidential assignments. Among them were six pioneering women, tasked with figuring out how to program the world’s first general-purpose, programmable, all-electronic computer—better known as the ENIAC—even though there were no instruction codes or programming languages in existence. While most students of computer history are aware of this innovative machine, the great contributions of the women who programmed it were never told—until now. 

Over the course of a decade, Kathy Kleiman met with four of the original six ENIAC Programmers and recorded extensive interviews with the women about their work. Proving Ground restores these women to their rightful place as technological revolutionaries. As the tech world continues to struggle with gender imbalance and its far-reaching consequences, the story of the ENIAC Programmers’ groundbreaking work is more urgently necessary than ever before, and Proving Ground is the celebration they deserve.

Link to book on Amazon

More on the first computer programmers:

and even more can be found in the article The Forgotten History Of The Women Who Programmed The First Modern Computer