IEEE Annals of the History of Computing

In an effort to replicate its experience with Minitel, the first successful mass-market digital information-distribution ecosystem, in 1991 France Telecom launched 101 Online in San Francisco. 101 Online was as massive a failure as Minitel had been a success. This article reveals the previously undocumented history of the 101 Online ecosystem and suggests reasons why it failed where Minitel had su... View full abstract»

In 1972, the US Supreme Court issued Gottschalk v. Benson, one of the most prominent decisions in the history of software patenting. It ruled that a computer program developed at Bell Laboratories by Gary Benson and Arthur Tabbot was ineligible for patent protection. This article argues that the journey of Benson and Tabbot's program through the patent system from 1963 to 1972 consists of a series... View full abstract»

A collection of trip reports from Western computer experts who visited the Soviet Union in the 1960s reveals details about interactions between these Westerners and their Soviet counterparts during the height of the Cold War. These previously unexplored first-hand perspectives help to illuminate how such interactions shaped and countered American perceptions of Soviet computing and the threats it ... View full abstract»

This article is the second in a two-part series exploring the development of the early history of information technologies, from the 1940s to the present. This article describes the evolving information infrastructure used by historians in support of their research on the history of computing and of the role of IT practitioners, computer executives, scientists, and universities in creating that su... View full abstract»

One of two major IBM supercomputer efforts in the late 1960s, the Advanced Computer Systems (ACS) project had significantly more ambitious performance goals than the earlier IBM System/360 Model 91 project, and it pioneered many features that became common decades later. Although the project was canceled, it brought many talented engineers to California and contributed to several later development... View full abstract»

Fernando Corbató is best known for his work developing time-sharing operating systems. Early in his career, Corbató had a key role in the development of both the Compatible Time-Sharing System (CTSS) and Multics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1960s. This interview is the second in a two-part Annals series based on an oral history conducted by Steven Webber for the Computer His... View full abstract»