Open Computing History Project

The Open Computing History Project is a research and preservation effort based in the Department of Computer Science. We collect, catalogue and publish primary sources on the history of computing: hardware, documentation, software, and the recollections of the people who built and used these systems.

The project started in 2006 as a graduate seminar on the history of timesharing and has since grown into a small archive and hardware lab staffed mostly by student and community volunteers. Everything we publish here is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license unless a donor has asked otherwise.

What we collect

• Manuals, rate cards, internal memos and other paper documentation
• Software on original media, which we image and describe
• Working and non-working hardware for study and restoration
• Oral history interviews with operators, programmers, sysops and users

Getting involved
The hardware lab meets on the first and third Saturday of each month in room 2.114 of the Engineering Annex. Volunteers do not need any prior experience. If you have material you would like to donate, or questions about using the collection for research, please use the contact form or post in the forums.

The project is supported by a small departmental grant and by individual donors.