Computer History Museum

…t at 4:00 in the morning, I got a phone call at home and it was the computer operator. And he said, ‘Margaret, something terrible has happened to your program.’ I said, ‘What happened?’ And he said, ‘It doesn’t sound like a seashore anymore.’ So I went — I drove in and I figured out the problem and we put it back up and everybody said, ‘Oh,…

…ce notes with silicon chips from microprocessor vendors mounted under a Lucite window on the cover. Pondering how to dispose of unused chips Slater conceived a “billion dollar” toilet seat and cover to represent the vast R&D investment that went into the industry annually, much of it being spent on products that were ultimately unsuccessful, and essentially “flushed down the toilet.” He spent several months experimenting with various materials and molds before producing the artifact that became notorious after appearing in a photograph with Andy Grove and Gordon Moore of Intel.

Thunderlizards are, in Ann’s words, audacious entrepreneurs that shoot laser beams out of their mouths and wreak havoc on the industry they have invaded. They are here not just to start a business but to start a movement. That description certainly applies to Leah, who scaled TaskRabbit in 40 markets and saw it acquired…

It may come as a surprise, then, to learn that PowerPoint was not the first presentation program. Rather, there were several programs for personal computers that performed similarly to PowerPoint in many respects, which appeared starting in 1982 — fully five years before PowerPoint’s debut. PowerPoint’s ubiquity is not the result of a first-mover advantage.²

Programming the differential analyzer could be painful. “The plugging operation is unfortunately accompanied by an electric shock hazard (though hardly a dangerous one),” Nordsieck warned, “since once one end of a cord is plugged in, the prongs of the free plug may have up to 105 volts …

Nor was Greene nervous about taking more risks. She founded her third company, Bebop, in 2013, when she couldn’t convince anyone else to run with her idea for an enterprise development platform. It was bought by Google two years later for $380 million, and Greene joined the company as executive vice president of Google Cloud Enterprise. As the search giant enters a sector dominated by Amazon, Microsoft, and IBM, she has set the ambiti…

…ntrepreneurs to keep in mind where they want to go and why and to be tenacious about getting there. Recruit great people by sharing a compelling vision, she says, and provide a work environment and culture that is stimulating and makes people feel excited to show up every day. And then let them run . . . or perhaps sail.

“Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything.”

“and one I’…uter’s introduction, earlier computers looked more like “black boxes or gray boxes or white boxes.” For the 7600, Cray chose the blue-glass doors and walnut trim as “an experiment in aesthetics,” he said, “and one I’m kind of proud of.”

The CDC 7600 was the brainchild of Seymour Cray, who from the 1950s through the 1980s was the undisputed champion among supercomputer designers. Working from a rural laboratory in his hometown of Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, Cray had also designe…