History of Information Technology

This website is a virtual complement to the exhibition “History of Information Technology” in the MEC Library Archives. Based on a personal collection of vintage technology donated to the Library Archives, the exhibition includes devices (all in working order) from an authentic Morse telegraph key to one of the earliest Mac computers. The online presentation tells the stories of select machines and contrivances. Its main topic, however, is information. We will look at ingenious encoding methods (transforming data so that it can be accurately and securely consumed by a different type of system) and innumerable inventions people made to create, store, transform, restore, replicate, retrieve, transmit, and receive information.

Co-curators: Leonid Knizhnik (CIS Department) and Yelena Novitskaya (Library)

The header image is an illustration of a simple information encoding system, dactylonomy, or, counting on fingers. For more about encoding information, read this and this.

To see all the posts, go to All posts or click here.

Resources used:

ASCII Art Archive @ https://www.asciiart.eu/

Charles Babbage Institute. University of Minnesota @ http://www.cbi.umn.edu/about/babbage.html

Computer History Museum @ https://computerhistory.org/

Encyclopedia Britannica @ https://www.britannica.com/

Explain That Stuff! @ https://www.explainthatstuff.com/

Getty Images @ https://www.gettyimages.com/

The History of Computer @ https://history-computer.com/

History of the LP Record @ https://lprecord.umwblogs.org/

How Stuff Works @ https://www.howstuffworks.com

IEEE Spectrum @ https://spectrum.ieee.org/