From the Archives

Hansen Hsu, curator for the Software History Center, explores the software development kit that almost wasn’t and the choices that enabled Apple’s App Store to spawn a worldwide app economy. This episode features clips from a number of public panels and oral histories, including original iPhone UIKit team manager Nitin Ganatra, radio software engineer Andy Gringion, and WebKit manager Richard Williamson.Image © Apple

Evelyn Berezin was born in the Bronx, New York, in 1925. She received her bachelor’s degree in physics in 1945 from New York University, followed by an Atomic Energy Commission fellowship for graduate study in 1946. In 1962 Berezin built a reservations system for United Airlines, one of the largest computer systems built at the time. In 1969 she founded and served as CEO of Redactron, a new maker of word processors. Part one of two focuses on Berezin’s education and early work.

Henry Tropp, a professor of mathematics at Humboldt State University, was one of the speakers at the first West Coast Computer Faire's Saturday night banquet in 1977. This episode captures part two of his talk, “The 1940s: The First Personal Computer Era,” focusing on the developments in the late 1940s in the UK and the US and the ties between computer designers, especially in software development.

Henry Tropp, a professor of mathematics at Humboldt State University, was a speaker at the first West Coast Computer Faire's Saturday night banquet in 1977. This episode captures part one of his talk, “The 1940s: The First Personal Computer Era,” covering the origins of digital computing through 1947 and the ways in which it paralleled the microcomputer revolution of the 1970s.Image: Digibarn

Richard Shoup (1943−2015) won an Emmy and a Technical Oscar for his foundational work in computer graphics and the development of the early graphics system, SuperPaint. The system created graphics for projects as diverse as NASA's Pioneer Venus program and children's television programs on San Francisco's KQED. This lecture by Shoup was recorded in January 2000.

In the debut of From the Archives, we hear Computer History Museum Fellow Harry Huskey (1916-2017) in a rare 1976 recording discussing his work on early computers, including designing the Standards Western Automatic Computer (SWAC).