The Pc Historical past Museum is without doubt one of the most well-known establishments of its sort. Positioned in Mountain View, Calif., the museum chronicles the affect of computing and technological innovation via artifacts and thru archived movies, pictures, and paperwork. The workers conducts oral histories, hosts stay occasions, and curates displays.

All its work wouldn’t be doable with out the museum’s skilled historians of know-how. One is David C. Brock, director of curatorial affairs, who additionally heads the museum’s Software program Historical past Middle. His analysis focuses on histories of computing, electronics, semiconductors, and software program. He has performed greater than 200 oral histories of pioneers within the fields.

The IEEE affiliate member has been with the museum since 2016 and has curated displays and occasions whereas commonly publishing historic essays.

One latest venture he’s excited to be engaged on is the “Artwork of Code” exhibition, which is scheduled to run via subsequent 12 months. Exploring how software program is developed, the exhibit additionally considers its impacts.

“The ‘Artwork of Code’ is a chance for us to carry occasions round releases of some vital historic supply code for the primary time,” Brock says. Guests will be capable to look behind the scenes of making pc code, see how the software program works, and notice how the code was organized.

Brock says he believes it’s vital to make the supply code obtainable for traditionally vital applications as “an object for research, similar to different objects in a museum.”

“These historic supply code releases are one thing that’s distinctive to the Pc Historical past Museum,” he says.

Smalltalk, PostScript, and the Apple Lisa

The “Artwork of Code” kicked off with the September celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of Smalltalk. The programming language and surroundings was developed at Xerox Parc, in Palo Alto, Calif.

“The Smalltalk strategy to pc programming and pc languages known as object-oriented programming, and it has been extremely influential,” Brock says. “Lots of the mostly used programming languages at this time embody this object-oriented programming strategy.”

The pioneers who developed Smalltalk mentioned its affect throughout a museum occasion. (You can also learn IEEE Spectrum’s Q&A with Adele Goldberg, one of many builders, concerning the affect the language has had on programming.)

This month the museum plans to launch the supply code for Adobe’s PostScript, which performed a key position within the digital revolution in printing and publishing, Brock says.

The supply code for Apple’s Lisa, the predecessor to the Macintosh, is about to be exhibited subsequent month. Brock says that though Lisa wasn’t a industrial success, it was vital in establishing the graphical person interface as we all know it at this time.

“The Lisa pc launched the entire idiom of the desktop, folders, and the ‘What you see is what you get’ kind of phrase processors,” he says. WYSIWYG reveals customers how content material will seem on a printed web page, with out the necessity for extra coding.

Understanding how a know-how develops

Brock grew up throughout the rise of non-public computer systems and pc networking. He says he used to have a simplistic view of science and know-how, assuming there was “an easy scientific methodology—that science simply will get transferred over into new applied sciences.”

It wasn’t till he studied logic and the philosophy of science at Brown College, in Windfall, R.I., that he “grew to become fascinated by how vital know-how is for society and tradition however how little we perceive the way it develops and evolves,” he says. “That’s what obtained me fascinated about trying to the previous to know how science and know-how work.”

He went on to earn a grasp’s diploma within the sociology of scientific data from the College of Edinburgh and one other grasp’s within the historical past of science from Princeton.

“At first, I checked out know-how from a philosophy of science perspective,” he says. “In subsequent research, I checked out it from a sociological perspective.” What he realized, he says, is that the historical past of know-how is basically about folks.

Documenting the life and instances of Gordon Moore

Earlier than becoming a member of the Pc Historical past Museum, Brock labored for 17 years on the Science Historical past Institute, in Philadelphia. One factor he observed there was that the contributions of these engaged on the chemistry, chemical engineering, and materials sciences of built-in circuits and semiconductors had been underappreciated.

He determined to conduct oral histories with the pioneers of semiconductor electronics, together with Intel cofounder Gordon Moore.

That led Brock to coauthor a number of books together with Moore’s Regulation: The Lifetime of Gordon Moore, Silicon Valley’s Quiet Revolutionary andMakers of the Microchip: A Documentary Historical past of Fairchild Semiconductor. He additionally wrote and helped produce a number of documentaries, together with Moore’s Regulation at 50 and Scientists You Should Know: Gordon Moore.

Collaborations on IEEE Milestones

Brock has collaborated with the IEEE Historical past Middle and the IEEE Santa Clara Valley (Calif.) Part on the IEEE Milestones program, which acknowledges excellent technical developments world wide. On 11 September 2021, IEEE and the Pc Historical past Museum held an occasion to commemorate 11 milestones in Silicon Valley. They included Shakey the robotic, the RISC and SPARC chips, and the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory. The museum has a devoted wall the place many IEEE Milestone plaques are displayed.

Brock is an energetic IEEE volunteer. He has served on IEEE Spectrum’s editorial advisory board and the IEEE Pc Society’s historical past committee. His articles for Spectrum embrace a profile of superconducting pioneer Dudley Buck and a take a look at the origins of PowerPoint. He’s on the editorial board of the IEEE Annals of the Historical past of Computing.

“My position in IEEE is fascinating: a historian contributing to this neighborhood with out a formal background—or employment—in electrical engineering,” Brock says. “What I’ve regularly loved is how a lot curiosity there’s in historical past amongst IEEE members, and the way historical past can join and instruct these communities.”