Digital exhibits
Explore digital exhibits curated from the Charles Babbage Institute Archives.
Digital State: The Story of Minnesota's Computing Industry
A companion piece to Thomas J. Misa's book, Digital State: The Story of Minnesota's Computing Industry. "To begin, this book makes a compelling case that the first distinctive computing industry took form in the Twin Cities. While other cities with significant early computing activity such as Philadelphia, Detroit, Boston, and Endicott or Poughkeepsie in upstate New York were typically dominated by one or two large computing companies, in the Twin Cities an early pattern of "spin-offs" and "start-ups" created by the early 1960s at least thirty computing companies active in the state."
Gender Codes: Why Women are Leaving Computing
A companion piece to former CBI Director, Thomas J. Misa's book, Gender Codes: Why Women Are Leaving Computing. Providing a unique international perspective, the contributors to this volume reveal how computing has become male-coded, highlighting the struggles women have faced in the office, the media, and in culture at large.
‘The Machine That Changed the World’: ACM and the History of Computing, 1947-2010
Since its inception in 1947, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) has grown from a local organization of 52 individuals to a worldwide educational and scientific computing society of over 95,000 members. The ACM Records contain 57 boxes of information about ACM’s administration, operations, and projects and tell the story of the society’s development and expansion over the first 60 years of its existence. Focusing on many of the key aspects of the work of the association, this exhibit pulls together documentary and visual evidence of ACM’s activities from the organization’s records as well as from supporting collections.