The 1981 Framebuffer Show

In 1981, a groundbreaking show featured digital art on monitors connected to framebuffers and a computer. This marked the first time digital images were displayed in their native electronic form, a practice that has since become standard worldwide. The exhibition, held at the Association for Computing Machinery’s SIGGRAPH conference in Dallas, was conceived by a small team of tech pioneers who defied all odds to make it happen.

The small team was based out of the Computer Graphics Lab at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena. It included the lab’s manager, Robert Holzman; computer scientist Jim Blinn; systems engineer Julian Gomez; systems engineer Eric Levy; independent artist David Em, who was the lab’s Artist-in-Residence; and James Seligman, Em’s producer.

The digital images displayed were primarily by Em, Blinn, and the New York Institute of Technology’s Computer Graphics Lab (NYIT or New York Tech CGL). The exhibition was viewed by thousands of attendees and paved the way for future purely electronic exhibitions.

While computer-generated art had been exhibited prior to this show, such as at the Howard Wise Gallery in New York (April 1965) and the Cybernetic Serendipity exhibition (August to October 1968) at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, the artworks exhibited there, for the most part, were works on paper.

The Key Players

Robert Holzman was not a typical corporate manager; he was an engineer with a background in deep space photography. Holzman’s genius was to hire talented people, then step back and let them do what they did best, while shielding them from the federal bureaucracy at the JPL. He was also a visionary with a passion for the arts. Holzman later married Patric Prince, a key figure in digital art exhibitions throughout the 1980s.

In 1975, Holzman sought funding within NASA to establish what would become the JPL Computer Graphics Lab, a research facility focused on creating deep-space simulations and media for public dissemination. These would eventually be viewed by billions of people worldwide.[1]

Meanwhile, around the same time, digital artist David Em was looking for a high-tech institution in the United States with which he could collaborate to pursue his interest in digital art. He had recently built a framebuffer (the key memory component of graphics cards and GPUs) from scratch; however, he quickly realized that to create the art he envisioned, he needed to be affiliated with a large institution that could provide access to higher-end computer hardware and sophisticated software.

Em contacted JPL and got Holzman on the other end of the phone — shortly after, Em visited Holzman in his office and they spent the afternoon talking about art. As they were wrapping up, Holzman said to Em, “You know, if I ever do get funding, it would be great to have an Artist-in-Residence, would you be interested in doing that?”

About a month later, Holzman secured funding for his Graphics Lab at JPL, and in January of 1976, Em moved to Pasadena; however, it took almost another year and a half before JPL allocated space for the lab on its campus, the machines were up and running, and staff were hired. By the summer of 1977, Jim Blinn had arrived, and shortly after that, Julian Gomez.

Julian Gomez, who had just graduated from UC Berkeley, served as the Graphics Lab’s technical specialist. He left JPL in 1982 to pursue his doctorate with computer scientist Franklin C. Crow at Ohio State University. Here, he also collaborated with pioneering digital artist Charles “Chuck” Csuri, who was the lab director and head of the Computer Graphics Research Group.

Jim Blinn had recently earned his doctorate at the University of Utah, where he studied in the department founded by David Evans and Ivan Sutherland. Evans and Sutherland also founded a company (Evans & Sutherland, or E&S) that created digital simulations and produced the first commercial framebuffers.

Blinn’s advanced simulation software greatly contributed to the JPL Graphics Lab’s success. During his tenure at JPL, some of his early projects involved creating films simulating the Voyager I and II flybys of Jupiter and Saturn.[2] Blinn and his former mentor, Sutherland, would later both receive prestigious awards for their substantial contributions to the field of computer graphics.

Blinn and Em shared a symbiotic work relationship for more than a decade. Both would often work from 5 P.M. to 9 A.M., once the regular nine-to-fivers had gone home. Sitting in a cold room so the computers would not overheat, dressed for winter, it was almost like working on a space station. While Blinn was developing and improving the software, Em was using it to create art. His work from this period reflects the deep-space atmosphere in which he and Blinn were working.

While using the software to create art, Em would inevitably encounter glitches and would notify Blinn, who would fix them. The first artworks by Em, created with Blinn’s software on an E&S framebuffer in Holzman’s Graphics Lab at JPL, were produced at the end of 1977. Blinn’s software had come a long way by September 1979, with the ability to create three-dimensional virtual worlds on the screen, including texture mapping and matrix transformations. Em was able to create images like Transjovian Pipeline, demonstrating what was technically possible with framebuffers at the time; an image that would become the poster child for digital art throughout the 1980s.

The team at NYIT that contributed artworks to the 1981 Framebuffer Show was directed by computer scientist Lance Williams, a researcher at the NYIT Computer Graphics Lab, which, like the JPL Graphics Lab, operated both as a research lab and a production facility. NYIT was founded in the 1950s by Alexander Schure, who envisioned creating feature-length animations. Comprised of both computer scientists and designers who collaborated to generate computer graphics, NYIT’s work environment was unique.

Defying the Odds: Preparing the Show

In June of 1981, just two months before the SIGGRAPH conference in Dallas, Holzman, Blinn, and Em met in the Graphics Lab to discuss the prospects of producing a framebuffer show. Blinn and Em proposed the project, which they had been contemplating for some time, and asked Holzman to allocate the lab’s resources. If they could pull it off, this would be the first time pixel images were displayed as intended in a public setting — that is, electronically, with direct feeds to high-resolution (at that time) monitors from framebuffers and a computer.

Holzman, who was passionate about the arts, agreed without hesitation — and the project quickly went into high gear. Part of the Graphics Lab team was at the same time preparing a film for the upcoming Voyager II flyby of Saturn (August 8, 1981), scheduled to take place around the same time as the conference.

Precisely how SIGGRAPH, then chaired by Thomas A. DeFanti, was brought on board remains unclear, but someone within the Graphics Lab made the necessary phone call to secure the showroom. James Seligman, with extensive production experience, was responsible for general communication between the team and external collaborators. He was also responsible for writing the press release.

But, would they be able to produce a show in less than two months, let alone secure the equipment? “It was pretty outrageous,” recalls Blinn, to even conceive of producing such a show. The monitors, framebuffers, and a computer could easily cost hundreds of thousands of dollars (in 1981 money!), and the sensitive equipment would need to be installed in the showroom (and later deinstalled).

Holzman preferred to remain minimally visible in the production of the 1981 Framebuffer Show to prevent it from appearing to be a NASA-sponsored project and to avoid drawing attention from the JPL hierarchy. However, he performed his magic and reached out to his hardware vendor contacts, including the vice president of Advanced Electronic Design (AED), Jerry Kennedy, who agreed to provide much of the hardware used in the exhibition.

In preparation for the show, Blinn told the NYIT contributors that they should submit their images on 9-track tapes (around 45–175 MB per tape). At the time, standard file formats, such as JPEG and TIFF, did not exist, nor did color spaces, let alone image compression.

Making It Happen

AED’s technical support assistant, Robin Radaczek, ensured that all the equipment was ready for the show on schedule, including six AED 512 8-bit framebuffers. It is unclear who arranged for six Conrac CRT (Cathode Ray Tube) monitors and, not least, a Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) PDP-11 computer that drove the AED framebuffers and the Conrac monitors. The 1981 Framebuffer Show now had well over $200,000 (around $750,000 in 2026 money) in computing and display hardware at its disposal.

Julian Gomez had just returned to JPL after the spring quarter ended at Ohio State University when Holzman tasked him with preparing the installation and assembly of the show in Dallas. Blinn and Em had already decided which of their images to include and were awaiting NYIT’s contributions — once the artworks from the NYIT arrived, Blinn discovered he had to spend considerable time converting the files’ brightness and color settings to prepare them for the exhibition.

Gomez recalls that he developed the image display software in FORTRAN IV PLUS code in record time. He arranged the AEDs to cycle the image files across the six screens, displaying them in random order to provide a dynamic viewing experience.

The 1981 Framebuffer Show was scheduled to open at 10:00 A.M. on the Tuesday of the conference week, and Gomez planned to fly to Dallas Sunday evening with the tape of the images for the exhibition. He had spent the past six weeks prepping the final tape and writing the script for the software to be used at the show.

Blinn and Em had already left for Dallas, but Gomez stayed back at JPL because getting the master tape right was no trivial matter. It took hours to write and verify the files, and the magnetic tape technology of that era was incredibly slow. He had to postpone his trip three times before finally boarding an early Monday morning flight at 2:00 A.M. from LAX to Dallas. Gomez remembers how the tape — the only master tape — did not leave his hands for the entire trip. They were cutting it pretty close with only about 24 hours to go until showtime.

When Gomez arrived at the Dallas Convention Center on Monday morning, all the hardware was already in place, ready to be booted and the software installed. Everything went smoothly until the images got loaded. “They all looked like garbage,” Gomez said, recalling his horror at seeing corrupted images on the monitor.

Scrambling to fix the issue they called Eric Levy, who had stayed at the JPL Graphics Lab. Levy poked around and discovered that the RSX-11 Operating System (Real-Time System Executive) running on the Graphics Lab’s PDP-11 was inserting words into certain parts of the binary data, which appeared as an error code and corrupted the values of the raw image files. Thankfully, Levy’s discovery allowed Gomez and Blinn to modify the software to skip over the flawed data — and Hallelujah — the images appeared correctly.

Gomez and Blinn had spent all of Monday on this issue, and Gomez returned early Tuesday morning to finish the script for playing the images. He wrapped up just 20 minutes before the doors opened. But, rather than getting some well-deserved rest after nearly 60 hours of non-stop pre-production, Gomez was asked by AED’s Jerry Kennedy to do a presentation on his part in assembling the exhibition.

Showtime

At 10:00 A.M. on Tuesday, August 4, 1981, the doors opened to the exhibition in Room N 206 at the Dallas Convention Center; it ran through Friday, August 7th. Em recalls being surprised when he arrived early in the morning and found a long line of people waiting to get in to see the show. In addition to the press release, the only promotion for the 1981 Framebuffer Show was some signs James Seligman had hastily printed and put up in the hallways of the Convention Center.

When the audience entered the dimly lit room, they encountered the artworks displayed across six Conrac monitors raised to eye level. The PDP-11 computer and the AED framebuffers were concealed behind a curtain. The software Gomez had written enabled each of the six Conracs to cycle through the digital artworks by Blinn, Em, and NYIT every 5–10 minutes.

A full list of the images included in the exhibition remains incomplete. The master magnetic tape may still be recoverable; however, recovering data from mag tapes from this era has proven difficult. Gomez, who has since founded the Computer Graphics History Institute, is working on recovering the files to provide a complete record of the groundbreaking exhibition.[3]

Based on the principals’ recollections, a partial reconstruction of the images in the exhibition is included below. Blinn’s images were contemporaneous with the Voyager I and II flybys of Saturn and Jupiter. They demonstrate his cutting-edge software, creating scientifically accurate texture mapping, transparency effects (e.g., the rings of Saturn), and cast shadows, as well as his work for Carl Sagan’s Cosmos television series.

Em’s artwork reflected his growing involvement with navigable virtual worlds inspired by the deep-space environment in which he was immersed at JPL, and integrated surreal and dreamscape elements. While his images had previously been published and exhibited in print form, presenting them to the public in their original electronic context was a fundamentally different experience.

Except for the artwork Swimmer (1981)[4] by Rebecca Allen, reconstructing a complete list of what was included from NYIT has not yet proven possible. Computer scientists Lance Williams and Dick Lundin may have contributed an 8-bit still image of their ant character from a film they were working on at NYIT, called The Works [5]; artist Paul Xander, who created 2D paintings using paint software written by Alvy Ray Smith, may have submitted The Desert Landscape; and computer scientists Fred Parke and Robert McDermott possibly included an image of the human body. Based on the known contributors from the press release and discussions with former NYIT employees, the images below are valid candidates.

Impact

The historic 1981 Framebuffer Show fundamentally changed how digital images and art are displayed today; however, it would still be several years before fully digital exhibitions became mainstream in museums and other public settings, such as Times Square in NYC and the Sphere in Las Vegas. The 1981 Framebuffers Show is a prime example of how collaboration between visionaries can manifest something “outrageous.”

Acknowledgements

This account has been made possible through invaluable conversations with David Em, Jim Blinn, and Julian Gomez, which have helped ensure that the accounts of what transpired at JPL Graphics Lab and the 1981 Framebuffer Show are as accurate as possible. Alvy Ray Smith and Amber Denker were important sources in clarifying the history of the NYIT contributors’ involvement.

Notes

1.) Simulation film of NASA’s Voyager II’s encounter with Jupiter by Jim Blinn from 1978 https://youtu.be/o4xIJlEV8Kw?si=i40JclYq-MTIjKeE

2.) Jim Blinn’s presentation on how he created the planets for the simulations disseminated by JPL https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/zvmx5h03xjur6mq6iig5c/How-to-Make-a-Planet-Narration-Good-V3-640x480.mp4?rlkey=atatsxkaldf10req5dplp9v37&e=2&st=bj2v5g6b&dl=0

3.) Julian Gomez has founded the Computer Graphics History Institute to help preserve narratives like this about the 1981 Framebuffer Show https://www.computergraphicshistory.org/

4.) Rebecca Allen’s Swimmer https://history.siggraph.org/artwork/rebecca-allen-swimmer/

5.) Lance Williams and Dick Lundin’s Robot Ant with Ipso https://history.siggraph.org/artwork/dick-lundin-lance-williams-robot-ant-with-ipso/

Main image: Transjovian Pipeline, 1979, by David Em. A three-dimensional simulation of a world, and one of the artworks cycling on the Conrac monitors at the 1981 Framebuffer Show. This version was recovered from the original pixels on magnetic tapes with the assistance of the Computer History Museum and Jim Blinn in 2021. Image courtesy of David Em.

About the Author

Catharina E. Santasilia is a Danish-born anthropologist, archaeologist, and author. She earned her doctoral degree in anthropology from the University of California, Riverside, in 2019, where she also taught various courses. Currently, Santasilia works as an archivist, producer, and editorial associate for projects related to both ancient and digital art. Known for her curiosity and adventurous spirit, she effectively bridges the gap between scholarly research and public engagement through her writing and curation of collections.

Originally published at https://computerhistory.org on April 10, 2026.

A Historic Pixel Art Exhibition was originally published in Core+ on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A Night of Stories and Surprises

CHM was packed wall to wall on March 11, 2026, to celebrate Apple’s upcoming 50th anniversary. Inspired to write his new book, Apple: The First 50 Years, after hosting CHM’s Mac at 40 event two years ago, David Pogue returned to the stage to guide the audience through five decades of ideas, innovations, people, and passion.

Pogue opened with a reminder of how Apple has grown from its roots in a garage to the behemoth it is today. Nearly a third of the people on the planet — 2.5 billion — are carrying an Apple device at any given moment. The company ships 220 million iPhones a year, generates $1 million in revenue every 90 seconds, and is nearing a $4 trillion market cap.

But the night wasn’t about numbers. It was about the people behind them.

Seeds of Apple

Taking the audience back to the company’s profit engine, the Apple II, cofounder Steve Wozniak shared what Apple’s success meant to him in a video clip. It wasn’t the financial awards but rather earning the respect of fellow engineers for his ingenious design.

But that ingenuity may never have had a chance to change the world if Bill Fernandez (Apple’s first employee) had not connected his two friends named Steve when he was in high school.

The Unknown Cofounder

On April 1, 1976, Ronald Wayne mediated a disagreement between the two Steves and unintentionally convinced Steve Jobs that they needed to start a company in order to maintain control of their intellectual property. Wayne wrote up a partnership agreement then and there, becoming the third cofounder of Apple with 10% of the company so he could, according to Jobs, break a tie when the Steves disagreed. Twelve days later, Wayne backed out. At the event, he had a chance to explain why.

Jobs later mailed Wayne an unsolicited $800 check — “a cheap tip,” Wayne joked. He never sold his actual stake in the company, he says, despite the myth.

Growing Up Apple

A part of Apple for its entire 50 years, Chris Espinosa joined as a young teen. When his mother got tired of driving him to Homebrew Computer Club meetings, he hitched rides with Woz. Espinosa wrote the Apple II reference manual before he could legally drive. At a time when computers were strange, misunderstood machines, the Apple II debuted at the West Coast Computer Fair in 1977.

Board chair Mike Markkula coached the team to give the impression of a successful company. Espinosa remembers wearing new corduroy pants to stand in the slickest booth at the fair. Like an explosion, he said, people suddenly realized they could have computing power all to themselves.

But not everything went smoothly as the company grew. Espinosa recalled how adding a last-minute Apple II emulator to the Apple III caused it to have a tendency to overheat… badly.

Espinosa said Steve Jobs inspired fierce loyalty even when he made life difficult. Like when Jobs hired Espinosa to lead Mac publications while secretly planning to fire Jef Raskin, Espinosa’s mentor. Jobs had an ex officio role as cofounder at Apple before he latched onto the Mac project, said Espinosa. He was considered by many to be a pest, not cut out to run a company. When Jobs returned to Apple with the acquisition of NeXT, Espinosa expected more of the same. But it was different, he said. Jobs had learned.

Leading Apple

Former Apple CEO John Sculley recalled how Jobs had courted him when he was running Pepsi with the now famous, “Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or come with me and change the world?”

Sculley wasn’t familiar with computers, but he had been an early Apple customer, having bought 550 Apple IIs to help his bottlers to send in their weekly sales figures. That status got him inside the Mac building. Andy Herzfeld had put a demo together that included dancing Pepsi cans, one of the first examples of computer animation that Sculley didn’t understand was a big deal at the time.

Sculley remembered Apple’s early culture and the sense of being on the cusp of something extraordinary, as well as the dramatic 1985 boardroom confrontation that resulted in Jobs’ removal from the Mac division.

Despite their disagreements, Sculley appreciated Jobs’s uncompromising standards.

There was an explosion of creativity under Sculley in the late ’80s and early ’90s, including Illustrator, PageMaker, Photoshop, and PowerPoint. He and his team also professionalized distribution and improved the Mac by making it expandable, and by 1992, it was the largest selling computer.

In the audience, Robert Brunner, Apple’s early design chief, who spearheaded the establishment of Apple’s world-class design studio, remembered the pressure of the early ʼ90s and the race to miniaturize and improve awkward portables. But despite his own accomplishments, Brunner says his legacy will always be “the guy who hired Jony Ive.”

NeXT Comes Jobs

Sculley was fired after 10 years amidst leadership disagreements about company direction. By 1996, there were 50 Mac models that no one could tell apart and 12 ad campaigns. There had been three CEOs, and the company was failing.

The Mac had never really had a modern operating system. To acquire one, Apple bought Jobs’ company NeXT and brought on him and brilliant engineers and leaders, including Avie Tevanian (software) and Jon Rubinstein (hardware).

Initially, they didn’t know what they were going to do, they just knew they needed new technology to compete with Windows 95 and other competitors. The NeXT technology worked, but it wasn’t what Mac developers wanted at the time. There was no other choice but to work it out. Tevanian describes the mixed reaction at Apple.

Apple’s new leadership focused on just four products (desktop consumer and pro; portable consumer and pro), and one iconic ad campaign, Think Different, with the opening line, “Here’s to the crazy ones.” In perhaps the greatest turnaround in business history, a company that was six weeks from bankruptcy became profitable at $45 million one year later.

Reinventing Apple

Former Senior VP of Hardware Engineering Jon Rubinstein, who had come with Jobs from NeXT recalled (on video) the first executive staff meeting at Apple, where he and Avie Tevanian looked at each other and thought, “What are we getting ourselves into?” That turned out to be a reinvention, led by the iMac and the iPod.

Beginning in 1998, the company frequently reinvented itself with new products: iMac, iPod, iPhone, iPad. When Jobs unveiled the iPhone in 2007, hardly anyone grasped that it would reshape the world. Espinosa said the first moment he realized its power was when he received a text message from his wife after the keynote that just said, “I want.”

Apple innovation didn’t end when Steve Jobs passed away in 2011. Tevanian noted that it simply shifted from blockbuster hardware to global software and services. The company succeeds by running faster and doing things better than the competition.

What’s Never Changed

The night closed with a final question: What threads tie Apple’s entire 50-year story together? Espinosa answered without hesitation: fear and pride. Apple was always terrified of being outpaced and always proud of doing things differently. Sculley added Jobs’s most consistent belief: “No compromises.”

The event concluded with a surprise — David Pogue performing a parody song he wrote about Apple fans to the tune of Pharrell Williams’ “Happy” that brought the audience to its feet.

Watch the Full Conversation

Originally published at Celebrating Apple at 50 — CHM on March 19, 2026.

Celebrating Apple at 50 was originally published in Core+ on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Spotlight on Three Remarkable Eras

This year Apple celebrates its 50th anniversary. Over the last 50 years, the iconic company has evolved through various phases: its founding in the garage; explosive growth with the Apple II; the debut of the Macintosh; the John Sculley, Michael Spindler, and Gil Amelio regimes; Steve Jobs’ return to save the company; the revolution of the iPhone and iPad; the current Tim Cook era.

At CHM, we’re celebrating Apple with an exhibit of rare prototypes from across Apple’s eras. Three are highlighted below.

Apple I

The Apple I, designed and built by Steve Wozniak as a hobby, started it all. After showing it off at the Homebrew Computer Club, Woz and Jobs were approached by Paul Terrell, the owner of the Byte Shop, the first chain of microcomputer retail stores in the Bay Area. Terrell’s order of 50 assembled Apple Is galvanized the Steves to start Apple. These first machines didn’t come with a case, so Jobs negotiated with local cabinet maker Charles Pfister Sr. and his son Chas, who knew Jobs as a teenager, to supply walnut wood cases to Apple I customers. On display is the original prototype case, made of birch and maple, designed and built by Chas.

Macintosh

Released January 24, 1984, the Macintosh brought the mouse-driven graphical user interface to a consumer desktop. While today all PCs work this way, this was revolutionary to most people in 1984.

On display at CHM are two notable Macintosh prototypes. One is a wire-wrapped board, made in June 1981 by Brian Howard and Daniel Kottke. Wire-wraps are hand-wired breadboards, assembled individually or in small batches at an early stage of development when engineers need to be able to change things quickly. Only when a design is locked down are printed circuit boards, which can’t easily be changed but allow for large production runs, made.

The second prototype is a Macintosh in a transparent acrylic case, made circa December 1981, also by Howard and Kottke. This may have been the first prototype to show approximately what the final case design, designed by Jerry Manock and Terry Oyama, would look like. It would have been given to software developers, inside and outside Apple, to let them start writing apps for the Mac.

Notably, at this early stage, this prototype still uses an Apple II power supply and floppy disk drive. The decision to use Sony’s 3.5” floppy drive wouldn’t be made until 1983, and is associated with a funny story where Macintosh engineers had to ask a visitor from Sony Japan to hide from Steve Jobs in a closet!

From Newton to iPhone

After winning a power struggle with Steve Jobs in 1985, CEO John Sculley managed to turn Apple around and lead it into the Macintosh’s first golden age in the late 1980s, powered by the desktop publishing revolution. Sculley began to look to Apple’s future, towards mobile computing devices. Apple’s first mobile device was the Newton MessagePad, the first of a new category Sculley dubbed “personal digital assistants” or PDAs.

What may not be well-known is that the Newton began as a tablet-sized device, code-named “Cadillac.” But marketer Michael Tchao managed to convince Sculley that a smaller, cheaper, and less ambitious device was needed. Sculley green-lit the Newton “Junior” so long as it would fit in a man’s shirt pocket. Cadillac and Junior were developed in parallel for a time, but ultimately Cadillac was cancelled, and only Junior shipped. On display are prototypes of both products.

Famously, Newton’s launch was a disaster. Sculley had preannounced the Newton in January 1992, but its release was delayed until August 1993. Worse, the device’s promised handwriting recognition barely worked, famously lampooned in the comic strip Doonesbury. Combined with a disastrous June quarter and other factors, Sculley’s association with the Newton contributed to his firing by the Apple board. Subsequent updates would fix most of the Newton’s original issues, but it never became the wave of the future as Sculley had envisioned, and it would be killed by Steve Jobs upon his return to Apple in 1997.

But Newton would plant the seeds of Apple’s future success in mobile computing. To make the Newton’s CPU, Apple co-created ARM, a joint venture with chip maker VLSI and British PC maker Acorn, with Apple owning a 43% stake. To keep Apple financially afloat in 1997, Apple sold most of its ARM shares. Thus, Apple’s ARM investment literally saved the company from bankruptcy. And when Apple began to make mobile devices again, like the iPod, iPhone, and iPad, it would use ARM chips.

The iPhone transformed both Apple and the computer industry, making a reality the mobile-centric world that Sculley could only dream about in the 1990s. Today, Apple-designed ARM chips even power the Mac itself, enabling Macs to be both powerful yet energy efficient. What might have been Apple’s biggest failure may have sowed the seeds to its greatest success.

Stop by the Museum to see the exhibit through September 7, 2026, and check out an audio tour of highlights (in three languages!) here.

About the Author

Hansen Hsu is a historian and sociologist of technology, and curator of the CHM Software History Center. He works at the intersection of the histories of personal computing, graphical user interfaces, object-oriented programming, and software engineering.

Originally published at Apple History in Prototypes — CHM on March 11, 2026.

Apple History in Prototypes was originally published in Core+ on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

2006 CHM Fellow

The Computer History Museum (CHM) mourns the passing of Sir Antony Hoare, a 2006 CHM Fellow and a foundational architect of modern computing, who died on March 5, 2026, at the age of 92. Tony, as he was known to friends and colleagues, was more than a scientist; he was a philosopher of the machine, dedicated to the idea that software should be as reliable and elegant as a mathematical proof.

Born in Colombo, Sri Lanka, and educated at Oxford in the Classics, Hoare’s unconventional path into computing gifted him with a unique perspective on language and logic. In 1959, while studying at Moscow State University, he developed Quicksort, an algorithm that remains the industry standard for efficiency nearly seven decades later. It was an early harbinger of his career-long pursuit: finding the most elegant solution to the most complex problems.

A Legacy of Rigor and Logic

There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies.— Sir Antony Hoare

Sir Tony’s contributions to the field are seminal. In 1969, he introduced Hoare Logic, a formal system of rules for verifying the correctness of computer programs. At a time when software was often a “black box” of trial and error, Hoare provided the mathematical scaffolding to prove that a program would actually do what it was intended to do. This work laid the groundwork for the field of formal methods and high-integrity systems.

Hoare’s development of Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP) later revolutionized our understanding of concurrency. By treating independent processes as entities that communicate through synchronized exchanges, he provided a rigorous framework for the parallel computing world we inhabit today. His seminal 1980 Turing Award lecture, “The Emperor’s Old Clothes,” remains required reading for any student of system design, famously warning against the “traps” of needless complexity.

A Curator’s Perspective

While many will remember Sir Tony for the complex logic that bears his name, those in the computer science community often reflect on his humility. He famously referred to his invention of the “null reference” as his “billion-dollar mistake” — a testament to his rare ability to critique his own monumental contributions with grace and wit.

I am reminded of a story from his early days in the 1960s at Elliott Brothers. He had been trying to explain the concept of a “recursive” subroutine to his manager. After an hour of Tony’s brilliant, dense mathematical explanation, the manager looked at him, completely baffled, and said, “Tony, I don’t care if the program talks to itself, as long as it doesn’t do it on company time.” Tony often shared this story with a laugh, a reminder that even the greatest minds in computing once struggled to translate the future into the language of the present.

The Museum extends its deepest condolences to his wife, Jill, and their family. Sir Tony Hoare did not just teach us how to code; he taught us how to think. His absence leaves a profound void in the global computing community, but his logic remains embedded in the very foundations of the digital world.

Learn More

CHM Oral History of Sir Antony Hoare: https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102658017/

Shustek, L. J., “An Interview with C.A.R. Hoare,” Communications of the ACM, March 2009, vol. 52, no. 3.

About the Author

Dag Spicer is CHM’s senior curator and is responsible for creating the intellectual frameworks and interpretive schema of the Museum’s various programs and exhibitions. He also leads the Museum’s strategic direction relating to its collection of computer artifacts, films, documents, software and ephemera — the largest collection of computers and related materials in the world.

Originally published at In Memoriam: Sir Antony Hoare (1934–2026) — CHM on March 11, 2026.

In Memoriam: Sir Antony Hoare (1934–2026) was originally published in Core+ on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Anything that could create more love is a positive thing. — Gary Kremen

Have you ever used a dating app? If so, you’re not alone. Hundreds of millions of people use dating apps daily. Just in time for Valentine’s Day, CHM Live featured a panel of online dating experts from different eras, including Cofounder of Operation Match Jeffrey Tarr, Founder of Match.com Gary Kremen, and online dating consultant Steve Dean. The panel was moderated by Hanna Kozlowska, author of an upcoming book on the topic.

Punch Card Connecting

“We were two males in college who were very unlucky at dating,” explains Jeff Tarr, cofounder of Operation Match. It was 1965, and he was a 19-year-old undergraduate at Harvard. With money he’d won on a quiz show and a knowledge of IBM machines gained in a summer job, he and a friend launched a new endeavor. Offered at elite colleges in New England, Operation Match was originally a questionnaire with 75 questions that hopeful students could submit to have an “all-knowing” computer match them with a compatible date for $3.

Advertised by newspapers that would receive 10% of the take, Tarr received 7,800 responses. He and his partner paid to have them punched onto cards and rented service on an IBM 1401 during cheap off-hours to have them processed. Participants received 6 “ideal dates” and Operation Match was up and running. Improving the questionnaire and expanding across the country, the second version was wildly successful.

Operation Match worked on a simplistic basis, Tarr noted, nowhere near today’s dating apps. Of the 150 questions, they only effectively used 10 in the computer sort. But, there is plenty of anecdotal evidence that it worked — married couples still approach Tarr to thank him for connecting them.

Internet Introductions

When Gary Kremen was in his late 20s and a graduate student at Stanford’s business school, he was looking for dates through personal ads and 900 numbers without success. Good at computers and intrigued by how personal ads drove revenue for newspapers, he devised Match.com, the first and biggest online dating service.

The first incarnation, in 1993–1994, was based on email since few people had web browsers at the time. When the internet arrived, Match servers would go into overdrive during lunchtime because people could only access the web at work. At that time, more women were entering the workforce, people were marrying later, and everyone seemed eager to find a match efficiently. When Kremen realized there was a disconnect regarding profile photos — men wanted them, women didn’t — he decided to dig deeper.

Talking to women customers and bringing women into the company made Match.com better, with security features like blocking. Back then, the market was so huge that Kremen wasn’t worried about customer acquisition, even though he might lose two customers if the service succeeded so well that a couple dropped off when they committed to each other.

App Attraction

Steve Dean says that today’s dating apps have made the cost of rejection very low, and users don’t usually leave an app permanently. Relationships often end after all. Lifetime user value is calculated not just on the initial period when a user joins the app but rather over the course of years. Often, a new user will burn out in first couple months because they’re using many apps at the same time, but after that wears off, they’re back on again. People clearly want to believe the apps work, but do they?

Dean believes dating apps have solved the problem of compatibility — delivering attractive matches — but a longer-term commitment that probably has a certain element of randomness is more difficult to deliver. Mobile devices and the ability to make profiles quickly has streamlined the industry. In 2012, Tinder collapsed everything down to four taps and a user could make a profile and get a match in seconds. That was unheard of at the time — the platforms required extensive questionnaires, and an eHarmony profile took 45 minutes to complete, for example.

But lately, dating app fatigue seems to be setting in. Dean is clear on the cause — the monopolistic Match Group and their addictive products.

Match Group owns Tinder, Hinge, Match, Plenty of Fish, and countless other dating apps. Dean treats himself as a guinea pig, joining all of them and more so that he can see what people are experiencing. That sometimes involves messages coming in during the middle of the night trying to get him to engage. He takes screenshots of those and puts them in a folder he calls “Notification Hell.”

AI is now playing a role in the industry. Dean notes that it is now possible to be engaging only with an AI on a dating app, further reducing the human authenticity that people crave. On the positive side, some apps are adding AI that can help a user create a better profile or join in on a thread to help them flirt. As Gary points out, AI is like any other new tool or platform, and it can be used for good and bad. The tech is still in its infancy as far as helping to solve the business side of dating apps. Once it succeeds, we’ll see connection like we never have before.

So, hold on a little longer and you just might find that special someone!

[Main image: From left to right, Hanna Kozlowska, Gary Kremen, Steve Dean.]

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Dating in a Digital World was originally published in Core+ on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Exploring the Books of the Computing Revolution

It may be hard to imagine in our current digital age, but printed books were once considered an innovative (and dangerous!) technology. And, for decades, books have helped people to understand the quickly evolving revolution in computing.

On January 20, 2026, author and UC Santa Barbara history professor W. Patrick McCray was on stage at CHM Live to share his experiences writing ReadMe: A Bookish History of Computing from Electronic Brains to Everything Machines (MIT Press, 2025). The fireside chat was moderated by David C. Brock, CHM’s Robert and Bette Finnigan Fellow.

Prologue

McCray began to think about his project during the pandemic, when he thought he might be able to write a book about books so that he could read at home and avoid traveling to archives. Those circumstances made him consider how every book has its own origin story and history, and McCray became just as interested in exploring the authors and their writing processes, their relationships with their publishers, and the cultural context of the books he was writing about as he was their content.

For ReadMe, McCray wanted to explore the ways technology was presented to the public. He limited his selection to nonfiction books that represented a range of different functions. Some, like Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock (1970), were bestsellers by any measure, some were technical textbooks, and others popularized computing for a general audience. He also had to choose his historical timeframe.

Records really do matter, says McCray, noting that it’s critical that people donate their papers to a repository. He shared what he found in some of those archives.

Chapter 1: Giant Brains

McCray first discussed Giant Brains: Or, Machines That Think, published in 1949. The author, Edmund C. Berkeley, had worked in the booming insurance industry from the 1930s to ’50s, a sector rich in data and among the major adopters of digital and electronic computers — called “giant brains” at the time.

Berkeley wanted to explain what computers were and how they worked and hired a writing coach to ensure that the average person could understand his book. Alarmed by post-WWII geopolitical tensions and the threat of nuclear war, Berkeley used the book to warn that computers were powerful tools that could be dangerous if not developed with robust ethics and morals.

Chapter 2: Power vs. Reason

MIT has a robust archival collection for Joseph Weizenbaum and his book Computer Power and Human Reason (1976), reported McCray. Weizenbaum was a computer scientist at MIT in the early 1960s famous for writing the program for the ELIZA chatbot that functioned as a Rogerian psychotherapist. Many users felt that ELIZA was interacting with them on an emotional level. Horrified to see how people imbued the program with empathy, Weizenbaum became concerned about what computers and computer scientists should and shouldn’t do. His book was a critique of the profession, and perhaps of himself.

Chapter 3: Manifesto

Ted Nelson’s 1974 Computer Lib/Dream Machines combined two books back-to-back, assembled and self-published by the author himself. It was a political manifesto that promoted computers as tools for personal liberation, freedom, and democracy. Nelson also predicted that people would someday have computers in their pockets and considered how they would interact with hypermedia and multimedia, like images, sound, and text. Reprinted in 1987, after the PC revolution had not unfolded the way he’d hoped, Nelson lamented that ubiquitous computers could oppress people from everywhere.

Chapter 4: Fonts and Text

Don Knuth, author of the influential The Art of Computer Programming series, was sitting in front of the CHM stage. When reading Knuth’s lectures about typography and typesetting, McCray recognized a shared appreciation for printing, fonts, books, and history. He felt that Knuth’s book on creating digital typesetting, The TeXbook (1986), had to be included in his own book somehow. Fortunately, many of the papers related to the book are at Stanford and many have been digitized.

Chapter 5: Radical Textbook

Carver Mead and Lynn Conway’s Introduction to VLSI Systems, published in 1979, was a textbook, but also a catalyst for the formation of a community. McCray found robust archival materials, for Mead at Caltech and in Conway’s online archive to explore how a textbook about how chips were designed actually had radical agenda.

Later, in the ’80s and ’90s, Conway told an interviewer that she could see her enduring influence at engineering schools, where chip designs reflected the principles laid out in her and Mead’s textbook.

Chapter 6: Newspapers and Newsletters

In addition to books, McCray also included newspapers and newsletters as important media for communicating about the computing revolution. In her Release 1.0 electronics newsletter, business analyst Esther Dyson explained the new world of cyberspace to the average reader in the 1980s and ’90s and became a regular talk show guest.

McCray included the San Jose Mercury News in his book in order to discuss the evolution of the modern tech journalist. Today, there are hundreds writing about some aspect of the tech industry, but the tech journalist was only beginning to emerge in the late ’70s and early ‘80s.

People like Evelyn Richards, a Mercury business reporter with traditional journalism training, and freelancer Michael Malone, who had once written promotional copy for HP, began writing about Silicon Valley at a time when mainstream publications were still learning what the place was all about. They helped bring attention and understanding to it, covering both the good and the bad.

Chapter 7: Readers

The enthusiastic audience shared their favorite books about computers and computing, with the clear winner being Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder, published in 1981. They also reported what books featured in McCray’s ReadMe they had read. See the results below.

Epilogue

McCray says that one of the most interesting aspects of writing his book was seeing the way that ideas like “author,” “writer,” “publisher,” and “bookstore” were dynamic over the time period he covered. How students learn about books, purchase them and consume them today is very different than in past decades. And introducing AI into the mix is making things even more dynamic. What does it mean when computers become authors? That remains to be seen.

In the meantime, be assured that Patrick McCray wrote every word of his book himself.

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Read Me was originally published in Core+ on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The forgotten sequencer that brought algorithmic composition to the home

Strolling around the Computer History Museum, there are exhibits that are immediately recognizable. All we need is a glimpse of the Altair 8800 or Apple I, and we just… know. We walk over and stand in front of these pieces, instinctively lowering our voices and giving a quiet nod to anyone nearby. Like noticing the chisel marks on a marble statue or the brushstrokes on an oil painting, we’re struck by the realization that what we’re seeing is the result of human imagination and ingenuity. What was once abstract and almost mythical is there right in front of us.

However, there are also items on display at the Computer History Museum whose significance isn’t immediately apparent. Take the Triadex Muse. You might mistake this wedge of metal, switches, and wood panels for an obsolete piece of stereo equipment or a Cold War-era intercom.

While it looks like something you’d find on some forgotten warehouse shelf, the Triadex Muse is an important piece of electronic music history. Developed by Edward Fredkin and Marvin Minsky at MIT in 1969, and commercially released in the early 1970s, it was the first algorithm-based sequencer/synthesizer intended for home consumers. It’s estimated that there were only 280–300 produced, making it a rare piece of gear.

You won’t find a friendly and familiar set of piano keys. The only controls are an orderly series of sliders. Its industrial design has more in common with that of a home appliance than a musical instrument. Like some sort of mystical radio receiver, beckoning users to adjust its controls until they land on some strange and alien wavelength.

Playing Music Through Binary Logic

The beauty of the Triadex Muse is in its simplicity. There’s no memory, no CPU, and no firmware. Just integrated circuits and electricity. Unlike the 1959 IBM 7090 mainframe computer, which was fed programming instructions via paper punch cards in coaxing out such party hits like Frère Jacques on the 1962 album Music from Mathematics, the only user input here is positioning sliders and flipping a couple switches.

If you were to randomly move the sliders to different positions and fire up the Triadex Muse, you’d likely hear the chirp of a square wave melody from its internal speaker and see a vertical band of blue and green lights twinkling in time. You might think that the Triadex Muse is like a modern step sequencer or drum machine. Orderly and predictable. This is 1972. Forget it.

You wouldn’t be wrong that the blinking lights correspond to a beat. At each tick of the Muse’s internal clock, this single column of lights shows the complete state of zeroes and ones. The Muse is essentially a 40 x 8 matrix, with zeroes and ones evaluated at each “tick” of its internal clock, triggering sounds, and with each state potentially changing what happens next.

While anyone with a background in computer science would know what these lamps represent, the average home consumer would have no idea. These glittering lights further add to its sense of mystery. Although you do get some control over the Muse’s output, you can’t play it like a regular instrument. Even the owner’s manual admits that, “The Muse isn’t a music box.” Depending on how you set the sliders, it’s unlikely you’re going to come up with a tune you can hum along with while you wash the dishes.

Making Melodies

While the Muse may sound like a robotic run-on sentence, it speaks in the familiar language of musical intervals.

The INTERVAL block has four sliders that select notes from the major scale. The positions of A, B, and C determine the pitch, while D adds an octave. There are no flatted thirds or minor scales. You can’t play the blues. Though you might want to if you once owned the Triadex Muse and look up how much they’re currently going for — $$$.

The four INTERVAL switches, like much of the Muse, are deceptively straightforward. You might flip several to the same row and think you’ll hear a chord. Once again the Muse doesn’t follow modern conventions.

The Muse isn’t polyphonic. There is no harmony or overtones. This is binary arithmetic. Each interval is a weighted four-digit binary number. When summed they generate a 4-bit number that determines a new pitch. Music from mathematics… indeed.

The Muse’s intervals are triggered when the positions that they’re set to get a one bit from either the C or B section.

If you were to stare at the blue lights marked C ½ to C6 long enough, along with your friends asking you if you were feeling okay, you’d notice that they follow a set pattern. And if you knew how to count in binary (and let’s face it we know there are some of you out there), you’d see that the lamps C1, C2, C4, and C8 form a four-bit counter, cycling from 1 (0001) to 15 (1111) in a continuous loop. C ½ is simply the clock itself, a square wave that turns on and off at a rate linked to the tempo. C3 and C6 form a separate two-bit counter that increments every three cycles. By setting groups of threes against fours adds variety to the sequence.

In most instances, if you set the INTERVALS only to C positions, you’d get repeating patterns of tones about as musically exciting as the 1978 memory game Simon (no offense to Simon, which you can also see on display at the CHM).

Pseudo-Random Sequencing

The B region is where the Muse becomes more than a repeating blooper of bleeps, but a generator of pseudo-random chaos. You might observe the flickering green lights occupying B1 — B31, and just when you’ve identified a pattern, the sequence feeds back and morphs into something new.

To understand what’s happening, first you need to know what the four THEME sliders actually do. If you think that flipping these will give you a familiar musical preset like rock, jazz, or a rumba, the Muse once again betrays you.

Each THEME slider is technically a “tap.” A tap is like a tiny beacon, monitoring the binary state of a specific point in the C or B region, and sending that off to an XNOR logic gate.

I know. This sounds complex. But understanding the B register is like finding the answer to a riddle. Once you see it, it’s oh-so-obvious.

At every click, the XNOR (Exclusive NOR) logic gate makes a decision based on what it receives from the taps. If the gate receives an even number of ones (including all zeroes), it sends a one to B1. If the number of ones is odd, it sends a zero to B1. In its default state, B1 — B31 will be a band of green.

Every decision the Muse makes lurches forward, sometimes syncing up as the same conditions persist, and then suddenly shifting when the inputs change. B1 — B31 is what is known as a Linear Shift Register, an ever-evolving bucket brigade of bits, where a new zero or one is handed to the top, while the bottom bit falls out.

A Predecessor to Modern Generative Music

The Triadex Muse is a dead-end in the history of electronic music. While one could daisy chain it to other Muses, it used a proprietary I/O. There are no control voltages you could patch into modular synthesizers. And MIDI was a decade away. Its entire ecosystem was The Triadex Muse itself, an external speaker, and if the march of blue and green squares wasn’t enough visual stimulation, you could also buy a light unit with Gaussian-like blurs of psychedelic colors flowing with the beat.

Like DNA from extinct species whose fragments persist in modern organisms, the Muse’s influence lives on in algorithmic composition.

In a 2001 interview, Sean Booth of Autechre, pioneers of generative electronic music said about their process that, “There’s absolutely nothing random about what we do. There might be a lot of number crunching going on, but there’s nothing random in there.”

This is exactly what the Muse was doing in 1972.

Marvin Minsky, the co-creator of the Muse, said in his 1981 paper “Music, Mind, and Meaning” that the challenge of composing music is that, “Whatever the intent, control is required or novelty will turn to nonsense.” This philosophy is hardwired into the Muse.

The melodies of the Muse could sound familiar. Or even strange. But its output still sounds like music, with underlying rules and logic that our brains detect as patterns, even though the Muse makes it almost impossible to predict what it will play next.

Main image: Triadex Muse, 1972. Computer History Museum, XD254.81. Gift of Ed Fredkin. Photo by Mark Richards.

About the Author

Jeff Cardello is a freelance writer specializing in software, technology, and design. His first computer was an Apple IIe, and he has fond memories of playing Wizardry, the chatter of dial-up modems, and typing `10 PRINT “HELLO”` and `20 GOTO 10` on any computer unfortunate enough to be left unattended. You can find him on LinkedIn where he shares most of his writing, and things he has found cool or inspiring.

Originally published at https://computerhistory.org on January 23, 2026.

Generative Music with the Muse was originally published in Core+ on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Jerry Nichols’s Early Designs in Silicon Valley

Industrial design in the 1960s and early 1970s was an important part of Silicon Valley’s transformation from fields and orchards to the world’s center for semiconductor engineering and development. But before glossy press releases and CAD mockups, there were pencils, felt-tip markers, foam-core, and the ingenuity of designers who had to make complex processes legible.

Jerry Nichols, with whom I spent two delightful meetings, belongs to that cohort. Jerry’s early work — spanning semiconductor handling, spin-coat systems, infrared bake ovens, aligners, and chemical distribution — shows how industrial design translated fragile laboratory methods into reproducible machines for a young industry that needed reliability and reproducibility to scale up to mass production.

Born March 7, 1941, Nichols was raised in northeast Indiana and graduated with a BA in Industrial Design from the University of Illinois, Champaign in 1963. He served as a US Army MP from 1963–1965 and moved to Silicon Valley after his military service to begin his design career.

Fairchild’s First IC Tester: Rendering the Possible

Nichols’s story in the Valley intersects early with the legendary Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation. In 1965–66, working alongside head designer Darryl Staley at JL Brandt & Associates, Nichols contributed to and studied renderings for what he recalls as, “the first Fairchild semiconductor test equipment,” producing renderings that matched a finished unit and a model used for customer approval. The exercise was typical of what industrial designers like Jerry do: showing engineers and executives what a workable product could look like and even how it could be used.

These drawings mattered. In a period when many instruments existed only as benches crowded with components, a coherent external form — operator panel, access doors, safety interlocks — signaled that the machine was ready to leave the lab and enter production, placing this work squarely amid the Valley’s turn from one-off rigs to standardized tools.

From Tweezers to Tracks: Automating Spin-Coat

The most revealing thread in Nichols’s early portfolio is the march from hand methods to automated wafer processing.

In the beginning, technicians placed wafers on vacuum chucks and dispensed photoresist with eyedroppers — fragile, inconsistent, and slow. Nichols’s work with International Instruments (II Industries) rendered and then refined machines that automated these steps: “spin-bake” units that gripped wafers, dispensed resist, spun them at high RPM for photo deposition, and then handed them off to the next step: infrared (IR) bake ovens. A prototype shell gave way to production cabinets with raised decks, service bays, and clear operator interfaces, forms carefully designed around messy, real-world fluids and maintenance needs.

Crucially, design here was systems thinking. In Nichols’s descriptions, trays moved under a dispense head; the wafer dropped to a vacuum chuck; split catch-trays closed; spin and spray occurred; trays rose and carried the finished wafer downstream. The boxes and panels are the visible part; the choreography — the designer’s translation of process into motion — is Nichols’ achievement.

Nichols is quick to point out that his work is a team effort, requiring the talents of mechanical and electrical engineering as well as input from sales and marketing. In particular, he cites his closest collaborators, Don Schuman, lead mechanical engineer, Gene Litton, lead electrical engineer, Gerald Starek, CFO, and Carl Story, the CEO of II Industries.

Heat, Zones, and Human Factors: The IR Bake Ovens

Nichols’s drawings and photographs also show production IR ovens with three controllable zones, integrated behind the spin modules.

These machines demanded more than a façade; they needed airflow, cooling, access paths, and readable controls in cleanroom conditions already stressed by heat. The design response consisted of elevated decks, removable panels, zoned controllers, and load/unload indexing. The documentation even catches the shop-floor realities: belts, motors, and the sheer bulk of equipment that nevertheless had to live in clean, human-scaled spaces.

Industrial design’s task was to highlight how the heavy and complex could appear precise. In fact, at this time the electronics technology used in II Industries’ products was vacuum tubes and mechanical solenoids. Nichol’s concepts outlined the choreography of internal mechanical movements required for building the first generation of integrated circuit-oriented wafer processing systems.

When Form Follows Throughput: From Trays to Cartridges

As wafer sizes crept up, tray handling hit limits. Nichols’s later drawings capture the transition to cartridge-based systems, enclosed carriers that sealed wafers from contamination and moved them, robotically, from tool to tool.

Here, the designer’s canvas widens: modules must dock, elevate, and align; control panels multiply; cabinets stretch to twelve feet and beyond. Yet the visual language retains calm, repeatable panel design grammars and sightlines that let operators grasp the system at a glance. The move from two-inch to larger wafers is legible in proportion alone and the design scales without losing clarity.

The Aligner That Didn’t Ship — and Why It Matters

Not every elegant-looking machine becomes a product.

Nichols preserved images and accounts of an ambitious CRT-assisted aligner: a cabinet with cast panels and integrated optics meant to replace microscope-based, human alignment of photomasks. The technology of the moment couldn’t deliver reliable, fast alignment so the prototype stayed a prototype.

Even here, the record is instructive. Industrial design — indeed CHM’s collecting philosophy — is not just about preserving the winners. Alternate designs are useful for embodying different hypotheses that engineering can then test. That body of “near-miss” hardware is just as much a part of the Valley’s R&D archive as are the successful products.

Small Tools, Big Impact: The Vacuum Pickup Chuck

Sometimes the best design is a hand tool. Nichols’s vacuum pickup chuck — devised to replace tweezers that chipped wafer edges — shows the same care for interfaces on the smallest scale: a scoop geometry, a flush vacuum channel, and an ergonomic grip. It sold for tens of dollars, not tens of thousands, but it attacked a yield-killing failure mode with elegant simplicity.

Such tools rarely earn museum pedestals; they live in drawers and muscle memory. They also make the machines viable.

Foam-Core Futures: Making Models Speak

One of Nichols’s most evocative artifacts is a full-scale foam-core mock-up of an etcher — approximately five feet wide, with meters and knobs set into shaped panels. The craft is notable: kerf-cutbacks to form radii, wood under-frames for stiffness, hot-glue pragmatism. But the real point is the communicative power of Nichols’ drawings. Before a dollar was spent on castings, the team could stand around a believable machine, negotiate heights, reach envelopes, service doors, and the cadence of the operator’s body. Model as meeting, model as argument — that is industrial design at work.

Why Jerry Nichols’s Early Designs Matter

Read as a whole, Nichols’s early work marks the Valley’s pivot from craft to system. He drew and then helped realize the interfaces that let a volatile new industry move from lab bench to production line. His renderings domesticated the unknown for investors and customers; his panels and cabinets distilled complex physics into repeatable procedures; his tools and models improved yield before the word was fashionable.

This is industrial design as infrastructure: the quiet shaping of machines so people can trust them. In an era now mediated by screens, these artifacts remind us that progress once depended on designers who could smell a hot motor, feel a sticky switch, and still imagine how a process might flow when multiplied by a thousand.

Jerry Nichols’s early designs are not just attractive shells over clever mechanisms; they are the design language that taught Silicon Valley how to speak in terms of mass production.

About the Author

Dag Spicer is CHM’s senior curator and is responsible for creating the intellectual frameworks and interpretive schema of the Museum’s various programs and exhibitions. He also leads the Museum’s strategic direction relating to its collection of computer artifacts, films, documents, software and ephemera — the largest collection of computers and related materials in the world.

Originally published at https://computerhistory.org on January 16, 2026.

Drawing the Future was originally published in Core+ on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In a world where we’ve gotten more cynical about technology there’s something pure about Pixar that people trust, says former CFO Lawrence Levy. With 29 films over 30 years, the company has never compromised in striving to entertain families in a wholesome way. But, in the early days, Pixar almost didn’t make it.

On stage for CHM Live on November 20, 2025, insiders told the behind-the-scenes story of how Silicon Valley investment bankers rallied around the struggling company next door. They wrangled founder Steve Jobs and manufactured an improbable IPO that rescued Pixar and delivered the first feature-length, computer animated film — the beloved Toy Story. The program was made possible by the generous support of J.P. Morgan.

Moderator Paul Noglows, formerly of Hambrecht & Quist, is cowriting a book with JP Mark, formerly of Robertson Stephens, on the two companies, which, along with Cowen, were the investment banks behind the Pixar IPO (initial public offering). He opened the discussion by asking Levy what it was like at Pixar in the spring of 1995, less than a year before the IPO.

The Setting

Levy had arrived at Pixar in late 1994 and quickly realized the company was doomed. It was facing three major challenges. The first was Steve Jobs, who was at a low point in his career and as difficult as ever. The second was that Pixar had no business, profits, or money. Despite their groundbreaking RenderMan graphics software, Jobs was covering payroll with personal checks. The third problem was that the company had signed a crippling contract with Disney.

Although Pixar was in dire straits, Steve Jobs had aspirations for it to go public, and he wanted Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs to underwrite the IPO. But the investment banking behemoths immediately saw that the company did not have “up and to the right” growth potential and declined to invest.

So, with Jobs’ begrudging agreement, Levy took the deal to his “local heroes at Robertson Stephens.” Former President and CEO Michael McCaffery remembered that it was hard to figure out who on staff could check out a company that wasn’t like anything on their typical list of semiconductors, software, computing systems, and communications. They, too, realized the numbers weren’t there, but that didn’t scare them. And when they saw what Pixar was doing, they were excited.

Cristina Morgan, the head of technology investment banking at Hambrecht & Quist at the time, also went down to see Pixar. As a Board member of Steve Jobs’ NeXT, CEO Dan Case had told Jobs that H&Q would play any role he wanted them to in an IPO. Like H&Q, she, too, was impressed with what she saw at the Pixar studio.

The bankers knew they were taking a risk with Pixar, but they believed that Pixar’s first movie, Toy Story, was worth betting on.

The Plot

With the investment banks on board, the Pixar team had to finish Toy Story, and that was a nearly impossible task from a technical standpoint. Everything in the movie was set in rooms inside a house because computer graphics could do boxes. They didn’t know if they could even make an outdoor scene. And they only had a matter of months before the film’s scheduled Thanksgiving release to figure it out.

Then there was the challenge of deciding when the IPO should happen. If they did it after a successful movie release, they could be accused of hyping the stock. If they did it after, and the movie was a flop, they could be accused of duping investors. And, of course, if the movie flopped, Pixar was dead.

Plot Twist

They decided to move forward with the IPO, and Steve Jobs set out on a three-week “road show” to pitch the company to potential investors. Cristina Morgan and Mike McCaffery went along. Picky about everything — from the hotels to the food and every detail in between — Jobs created plenty of difficult moments.

In New York City, potential investors were invited to a rented theater in the Upper East Side and told to bring their families to view Toy Story. To sweeten the pot, they offered free candy. The events were designed to, in Mike McCaffery’s words, “create the sugar high of all time.” After New York, the road show was supposed to go on to Boston for a breakfast meeting with investors. But there was trouble.

While the investment bankers knew that Pixar’s future depended on Toy Story’s opening box office success, Levy says that he and Jobs worried about beating the stock price that had been set. No one knew if investors would pay $22 per share, and if Pixar wasn’t “oversubscribed,” the IPO could be deemed a failure.

And, of course, Jobs felt that Disney was not doing enough marketing and everything they did do was terrible. He was on the phone telling a company that had been releasing movies for 50 years how it should be done. The stress was getting to everyone.

Point of No Return

Toy Story opened on Wednesday, November 29, 1995, on the night before Thanksgiving. It made $29 million its opening weekend and went on to become the #1 film in the US. It was the first non-Disney animated film that was a blockbuster.

The IPO happened a week later, and shares closed at $39, up 78% from the offering price. Jobs’s 80% stake was worth over $1 billion. Everyone involved could enjoy the success. Morgan recalled the incredible talent, and the artistry of the revolutionary graphics and technology. She said that it was striking how different and compelling Toy Story was and that without the movie’s magic there would have been no IPO.

Happy Ending

Although the stock price had dropped to $12 three weeks later, Pixar’s IPO had been a success as well as something of a miracle. Morgan credits the investors for their long-term vision in seeing the company’s potential. And Toy Story’s success allowed Levy to renegotiate the terrible Disney contract.

Twelve years after Levy arrived at a company with a negative retained earnings of $50 million, Pixar was sold to Disney for $7.6 billion. He recalled “walks and talks” with Jobs to make decisions and appreciated that Jobs was always more interested in getting to the right answer than in being right. After Pixar, Jobs returned to Apple in a remarkable comeback story that resulted in the revolutionary iPod and iPhone.

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The Origins of a High-Tech Industry

In college, Honghong Tinn built her own computers, using parts from electronic stores at her local shopping mall. While pursuing a PhD, she decided to research other Taiwanese “tinkerers,” uncovering how in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s they gained the skills and laid the groundwork for global tech giants like Acer, Asus, Quanta, and TSMC.

On November 4, 2025, Tinn, an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota, was on stage at CHM Live to share insights from her book Island Tinkerers: Innovation and Transformation in the Making of Taiwan’s Computing Industry. CHM Curator Hansen Hsu moderated the discussion.

Foundations

Tinn first provided a helpful summary of Taiwanese history. After World War II and the Communist takeover of China, Nationalist leader Chiang Kai Shek moved to Taiwan with 1.2 million followers. One thousand were alumni of National Chiao-Tung University, an engineering school dubbed the “MIT of the Orient.” They worked together to lobby the government to reopen the university in Taiwan, arguing that electrical engineering was critical for both the economy and the military during the Cold War. They succeeded, and the university opened in 1958, enabling a new generation of engineers.

A United Nations technical aid program allowed the National Chiao-Tung University to install the first two mainframe computers in Taiwan. They are IBM 650 and 1620 computers. Technicians, visiting professors, and other computer users had the opportunity to tinker with the mainframe computers. Soon, students in Taiwan began to build minicomputers and calculators from scratch. Many of the parts were not available, said Tinn, and they had to source recycled items, work with factories to custom make some components, or else import expensive parts. Future business leaders, like Barry Lam, the founder of Quanta Computer, was one of those students.

Factories

Taiwan became an important components manufacturing center in the mid-1960s, when the government encouraged multinational corporations to set up factories with tax breaks and inexpensive labor. American, European, and Japanese companies like Wang Laboratories, Philips, General Instrument, and Philco-Ford signed on. Women factory workers soldered IC chips, assembled transistor radios, black and white TVs, and wove copper wire into magnetic core memory units, sometimes under a microscope.

In 1972, just $200 US dollars could enable a tinkerer to buy a microprocessor and build a calculator, creating many entrepreneurial opportunities, and by 1978, 20% of calculators in the global market were made by Taiwanese companies. Those companies often transitioned to building computers in the 1980s. Entrepreneurs could choose to build one-of-a-kind computers and find customers, create an Apple or IBM compatible computer, or make a counterfeit knockoff.

Companies that built compatible machines for the export market had to make sure they weren’t running afoul of copyright infringement or risk being labeled as a counterfeiter. Apple, in particular aggressively pushed back against compatible computers with lawsuits claiming unfair foreign trade practices, working with US Customs and Congress to bolster their position. Tinn related how Taiwanese products and entrepreneurs were often stereotyped as counterfeiters.

Tinn used CHM oral histories to explore computer company Multitech (later renamed Acer), whose founder, Stan Shih, worked with engineers to ensure that his compatible computers did not copy Apple. As a franchisee for US companies like Texas Instruments, Zilog, and Intel, it was important that he was not seen as a counterfeiter. In fact, his computers had a unique feature to display Chinese characters, missing from US computers.

Unlike Apple, IBM allowed compatible computers until 1987, when they began to charge royalties for patents and licensing. Each company, including Compaq and Acer, negotiated their own rates. In the 1980s, those two companies, one American and the other Taiwanese, were the first to produce IBM PC compatible computers using Intel’s new 32-bit 386 chip amid a global competition. Doing so was a great technical accomplishment, and the companies also demonstrated their strong manufacturing capabilities and even marketing skills.

By around 2011, Taiwan had 90% of the global market share for laptops. Desktop market share was also growing, and if components made in Taiwan were counted, the numbers would be much higher. When a huge earthquake rocked Taiwan in 1999, CNN interviewed Steve Jobs, who noted that the whole industry gets components from Taiwan and implied that it could cause significant supply chain delays for people building computers.

Foundries

Tinn believes that tinkering activities prepared Taiwanese entrepreneurs and skilled labor that could advance computing technologies. For example, in addition to engineers, companies developed strong quality control and equipment maintenance roles and processes. In fact, an entire ecosystem of universities, factories, startups, and hobbyists were all interested in engaging with hardware and tinkering with technology.

This entrepreneurial ecosystem was evident in the case of global giant TSMC, founded by Morris Chang, who combined governmental and non-governmental support to create a company dedicated to fabricating chips for designers in a “foundry” model.

Founded in 1987, TSMC grew along with ASML, a Dutch spinoff of Philips that supplied lithograph machines for TSMC’s integrated circuit, or IC, wafer manufacturing. By 1995–96, 60% of TSMC’s revenue came from IC design houses, and Nvidia began to work with TSMC around 1998. And, in 2014, the company reached a turning point when Apple became a client and they began making chips for iPhones. Looking back on his long career, Morris Chang was most proud of his contribution in advancing the evolution of smartphones.

Gone were the days where Taiwanese tinkerers were seen as counterfeiters.

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Originally published at https://computerhistory.org on November 13, 2025.

Taiwan Rising was originally published in Core+ on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.