A perspective on the history of the Charles Babbage Institute and the Charles Babbage Foundation

The history of information technology

“…A series of workshops addressing different aspects of its history has been held from 2002 onward, including oral history interviews and roundtable discussions transcribed and placed online (Johnson, 2003). This work has been showcased in a special issue of IEEE Annals of the History of Computing (2001) and a series of subsequent articles in the same venue. Three special issues of this journal, edited by Burton Grad of the Software History SIG, have addressed key software genres.…”

“…In the late 1960s and early 1970s this was reflected in a set of conference sessions organized by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and a major investment (Carlson, 1986) made by AFIPS to support a Smithsonian program of oral histories (Tropp, 1980) with pioneers from the earliest days of electronic computing. The late 1970s saw the launch of two ventures that have provided the field's institutional backbone for three decades now: the journal Annals of the History of Computing (Galler, 2004) and the Charles Babbage Institute (Aspray, 2007; Norberg, 2001). Chartered by the newly created Charles Babbage Foundation and supported financially by AFIPS, the latter found a previous home at the University of Minnesota, along with an endowed chair and the Tomash dissertation fellowship.…”