Genius on the block: the foundations of the computing age go up for auction

In February 2005, the biggest private collection of some of the most important documents in the history of computing and telecommunications went up for sale at Christie's auction house in New York City. These documents include an unpublished 1809 manuscript on the influential Jacquard loom written by Joseph Marie Jacquard himself, a signed first edition of Karel Capek's RUR: Rossum's Universal Robots, the 1920 play that coined the term robot, and Norbert Wiener's own first-edition copy of his 1948 book Cybernetics, heavily annotated by Wiener with corrections for the second edition.