History of the IT History Society
Meeting of the CBF organizing committee on
April 28, 1978, at Rockefeller University, NY
(Charles Babbage Institute,University of
Minnesota, MN)
The Charles Babbage Institute (CBI) was established in 1978
by over two dozen senior executives from the information processing
industry, distinguished computer scientists, and historians for
the purpose of preserving, exploring, and telling the history
of computing. The Charles Babbage Foundation was organized separately
from CBI in 1981 when CBI moved from Palo Alto to the University
of Minnesota. CBF's core mission has always been to support
scholarship on the history of information technology. [See
CBI Newsletter vol.3 #1 (1981)]
THE FOUNDERS
Founders Adelle and Erwin Tomash
CBI was the brainchild of Erwin Tomash
(CEO of Dataproducts). Early founding members included Gene
M. Amdahl, Kenneth H. Olsen, Sam Wyly, and later Noble Laureate
Joshua Lederberg and distinguished historians I.B. Cohen and
Alfred D. Chandler, Jr. Over the years scores of trustees came
from many hardware, software, services, and venture capital firms,
joining with academics from such distinguished universities as
Harvard, Michigan, Carnegie Mellon, and Minnesota. Tomash and
his colleagues established the Charles Babbage Institute in 1978
for the purpose of collecting archival materials, training historians
of computing, and conducting academic research. In 1980-81 CBI
moved to the University of Minnesota, while a newly created foundation—CBF— focused
on fund raising and advising the institute.
Throughout the 1980s CBF raised funds in support of CBI’s
activities, creating what ultimately became known as the Tomash
Fellowship which has supported the Ph.D. research of nearly 30
young scholars and counting ; funding various history conferences
devoted to computing; financing the CBI-Tomash reprint series
of seminal works in computer science and history; and endowing
a professorship-director’s position at the University of
Minnesota , named “The ERA Land-Grant Chair in History
of Technology.” CBI’s founding director, Arthur
Norberg, was the first holder of the chair, beginning in 1989,
and the present CBI director, Thomas Misa, is the current holder.
MAKING IT HAPPEN
During the 1990s, CBF continued to raise funds for
CBI, making it possible for the institute to gain a solid financial
footing and develop into the world’s leading center for
the preservation and study of the history of information technology.
In 1998, a task force of IT executives and scholars hosted by
CBF led to a series of initiatives by CBI expanding its study
of the history of software, helping create a productive research
agenda for CBI and the wider computing-history field .
Around 2000, CBF broadened its mission to support the history
of information technology through other organizations, collaborating,
for example, with the Sloan Foundation, Software History Center,
and the Computer History Museum in experimenting with Internet-based
archival and historical research. It also advised historians,
promoted collaboration among academic organizations and museums,
and raised funds for scholarship. In recent years it also assisted
or advised IT corporations in preparing their own histories.
Over the course of its own history CBF continued to recruit trustees
drawn largely from the business community interested in preserving
the history of information technology. Many trustees donated their
personal papers to CBI, while others published their memoirs or
wrote histories, and served on the editorial board of the IEEE
Annals of the History of Computing |
