The Computer History Museum decodes technology for everyone. From the heart of Silicon Valley, we share insights gleaned from our research, our events, and our incomparable collection of computing artifacts and oral histories to convene, inform, and empower people to build a better world.
- Technological progress should be in service to human progress.
- Technology created and applied ethically can expand access to opportunity.
- Our computational past informs our digital present with lessons that span generations.
We facilitate dialogue and stimulate debate to encourage civic discourse about creative ideas and critical issues. We advance knowledge and the exchange of ideas through our commitment to thought leadership. We facilitate learning through unparalleled experiences that encourage personal connections. And we steward the world’s foremost collection of computing artifacts to preserve our collective history.
In this vein, the Computer History Museum in 2022-23 is producing Art of Code, a series of activities designed to inform and engage technologists and tech fans. These activities include the release of multiple pieces of source code; blog posts; in-person and virtual events; and information from our collection.
CHM is the premier organization releasing and interpreting breakthrough historical source code, which, along with the stories of the people who created it, provides unique opportunities to gain insights into how software is created and explore how it is relevant today. These releases help us to meet our mission to decode technology — its computing past, digital present, and future impact on humanity.
In the coming year, CHM plans to release the Adobe Postscript source code and the Apple Lisa source code on our website, for free with provision of an email address.
Since 2010, CHM has released the source code for historically important software, including Adobe Photoshop and Eudora. These releases have found a wide audience among technologists. The source code is accessed as a download, following a click-through agreement in most cases. Most of these releases have had well over 200,000 views, with thousands of views each year for years beyond the initial release. Several of these releases are now available on GitHub. All them are found on the CHM website.