DigiBarn Computer Museum: Stories

2013 Featured Stories

February 2013: New DigiBarn project around key Apple II DOS development documents and code (1978)

2012 Featured Stories

August 2012: DigiBarn "computer family" exhibit at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History.

2010 Featured Stories

A Classic Returns!
A new eBook Small Basic translation of the original "BASIC Computer Games" book originally edited by David Ahl (November 2010)

2010 Featured Stories

Ed Roberts (1941-2010) See our memorial page here.

2009 Featured Stories

A Digibarn birthday celebration! December 2009 marks the 40th anniversary of the founding of MITS, creator of the Altair 8800 and initiator of the homebrew and personal computing revoltion. Catch our special features on the founding of MITS in 1969 and it subsequent rise (and fall).

Barry Yarkon and the first desktop publishing with a microcomputer and the history of Barron Technical Products (Sept 2009)

Rich Didday on his life and times including Finite State Fantasies (May 2009)

Bob Frankston causes Global Financial Meltdown (interviews with Bruce Damer) (April 2009)

Interview of BYTE Magazine founder Carl Helmers (April 2009)

Bruce Damer with Tony Sale in front of the Colossus on visit to Bletchley Park (February 2009)

Steve Wozniak visits the Digibarn (video from 2006)

The Mac at 25! See our special pages of historic and unique artifacts!(thanks Dom Sagolla for his Big Words iPhone app showing the "25") (January 2009)

2008 Featured Stories

Bill Pentz and the earliest history of the Microcomputer (Fall 2008)

Mike Smithwick on Distant Suns, a pioneering astronomy program on microcomputers (Fall 2008)

Bana Witt's story of meeting Jef Raskin, becoming Apple's 49th employee and more (October 2008)

New! John Redant updates the famous IEEE Bushy Tree as a Wikia! See original graphical Bushy Tree here (July 2008).

Rob Barnaby on the history of WordStar, IMSAI, Micropro and more! (June 2008)

Videos of Mockingbird @ Xerox PARC, 1980 the first screen-based computer music scoring system (May 2008)

New! Digibarn features in CNET TV's Tales of Silicon Valley (January-February 2008)

DigiBarn Radio!

DigiBarn TV!

There are always more super stories at DigiBarn Radio and DigiBarn TV

2007 Featured Stories

The restoration of the LINC,"the World's First Personal Computer" (all year 2007)

Dwight Elvey gives us two video tours: Jef Raskin's Canon Cat and the classic ASR-33 Teletype (April 2007)

2006 Featured Stories

A Digibarn special event: Apple @ 30 - 1976, Apple in the Garage (was held Nov 4th, 2006)

The Processor Technology Sol-20 30th birthday event was held at the Vintage Computer Festival (Nov 5, 2006)

The (Xerox Star Icon) World According to Norm Cox (posted October 2006)

New! Ken Sumrall and playing Spacewar! on the PDP-1 (and Snow Flake and music!) (Sept 2006)

Special stories surrounding the 25th Anniversary of the launch of the IBM Personal Computer 5150
(all year, 2006)

The World of Xerox at the Digibarn - or how Xerox changed the world but nobody knows about it! (all year 2006)

A contributed work! James Humberd on his Computer Memories writing "Memories of Early Computer Days"
Find the long version at: www.travel-tidbits.com/tidbits/003673.shtml and the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing version here.

Brooke and the story of Felt & Tarrant and the comptometers (June 2006)

The computers and history of Southwest Technical Products Corp (May 2006)

IBM Corporate Ads, 1948-1954
See how the computer giant defined the value of computing for the public 50 years ago! (Jan 2006)

Mark Goldstein's story on MicroAge, Computer Music, Office and Home of the Future and more! (Jan 2006)

2005 Featured Stories

Report on the 30th birthday of the Homebrew Computer Club "Homebrew@30"
A special event was held by the DigiBarn at the Vintage Computer Festival 8.0, November 5-6, 2005

The story of the DigiBarn's Cray Supercomputer collection (October, 2005)

An interview with JJ Webb on the birth of the virus scanner, poetry on the (early) Internet
and much much more (April 1005).

The Story of the Xerox 9700 Electronic (Laser) Printing System (March 2005)

We marked Jef Raskin's passing on February 26, 2005. See our pages with our last interviews with Jef and our special feature: Jef Raskin a life of design (February 2005).

Mike Riddle relates the History of AutoCAD, EasyCAD, FastCAD and CAD in general (January 2005)

2004 Featured Stories

The Woz Wonderbook is here! (December 2004)

Maze War 30 Year Retrospective (special event, November 2004)

MIT Laboratory for Computer Science, original 1975 brochure (a peek into the birth of computer science as a discipline) (Nov 2004)

Jef Raskin's Story "Meeting Merlin" (posted Summer 2004)

The Mac at 20
A special feature story at the DigiBarn (Jan 2004)

2003 Featured Stories

The Xerox Alto 30th Birthday Celebration (a special event, October 2003)

The Intran Story (as told by those who were there - Fall 2003 and ongoing)

Is this the first Microsoft BASIC released to Apple Computer? You be the judge! (Feb 2003)

Interview with Wendell Sander, father of the Apple III (interview by David Ottalini from 1986 - Feb 2003)

Visit of DigiBarn Curator Bruce Damer to The Smithsonian Institution's Information Age exhibit in Washington DC (January 2003)

Maze War.. the first 3D multi user game, lives again at the DigiBarn, read its story!

2002 Featured Stories

John Redant and Bruce Damer's reworking of the famous "Bushy Tree" diagram of visual computing systems (Summer 2002 and ongoing)

F-Robert Trépanier's history in the Canadian Computer Business from the 1950s (July 2002)

Arrival of the Cray 1 Supercomputer and Cray Q2 Prototype at the DigiBarn (April 2002)

Incredible stories in the first and second issues of BYTE Magazine (Spring 2002)

NEW: See Alan O Freier's history of the Xerox "D*" Machines from Dolphin, to Dorado to Dandelion (Xerox 8010 Star) here. (Feb 2002)

NEW: Daniel Kottke's Amazing Apple Relics (Feb 2002)

Butler Lampson's famous 1972 Memo "Why Alto"? (Jan 2002)

Dave Curbow's extensive Xerox Star Historical Documents (Jan 2002 and ongoing).