IT History Society

IT History Society
Formation	2007
Purpose/focus	Promote and facilitate the preservation and study of the history of Internet Technology
Region served	World-wide
Membership	645+[1]
Chairman	Jeffery Stein
Main organ	Board of Directors
Website	www.ithistory.org

The IT History Society (ITHS) is an organization that supports the history and scholarship of information technology by encouraging, fostering, and facilitating archival and historical research. Formerly known as the Charles Babbage Foundation, it advises historians, promotes collaboration among academic organizations and museums, and assists IT corporations in preparing and archiving their histories for future studies.

Activities

The IT History Society provides background information to those with an interest in the history of Information Technology, including papers that provide advice on how to perform historical work and how historical activities can benefit private sector organizations. It tracks historical projects seeking funding as well as projects underway and completed. It maintains online, publicly available, lists of events pertaining to IT history, IT history resources, an IT Honor Roll acknowledging more than 600 individuals who have made a noteworthy contribution to the information technology industry, and a database of notable technology quotes.

A continuing project is one of aggregating the locations and content of IT history archival information around the world to facilitate and encourage IT history research and scholarship.^{[2][citation needed]} This International Database of Historical and Archival Sites currently consists of 313 international information technology historical and archival collections encompassing over 14.9 million documents.^[2] ITHS holds an annual meeting and conference. The most recent, with the theme of "Leveraging Yesterday: Using History to Create Value Today and Tomorrow in the High-Tech Company," was held on October 22, 2008 at Applied Materials in Santa Clara, California, USA.

Leadership

The current chairman is Jeffery Stein of Peyton Investments. The Trustees, Historical Advisory Committee, and Archival Advisory Committee are made up of distinguished individuals who have created technology, built companies, and recorded IT events as archivists or historians. The Board of Directors also includes David G. Arscott, Leslie Berlin, James Cortada, Peter Cunningham, Gideon Gartner, Brewster Kahle, William Hugh Murray and Frederic G. Withington.

Membership

Current membership totals over 600, with fifty percent of the members residing in countries outside the United States. Memberships are divided into three categories: individual, corporation, and institution. Membership is free. Corporate and institutional members include California Institute of Technology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Computer History Museum, Deutsches Museum, IEEE History Center, Hewlett-Packard Company, IBM Corporation, UK National Archive for the History of Computing, Intel, Microsoft Corporation, Stanford Silicon Valley Archives, Applied Materials, Symantec, Agilent Technologies Foundation, Internet Archive, and History San Jose.

History

The International Charles Babbage Society was founded in 1978 and operated out of Palo Alto, California. The following year the American Federation of Information Processing Societies (AFIPS) became a principal sponsor of the Society, which was renamed the Charles Babbage Institute.

In 1980, the Institute moved to the University of Minnesota, which contracted with the principals of the Charles Babbage Institute to sponsor and house the Institute. A new entity, the Charles Babbage Foundation, was created to help support and govern the Institute, in partnership with the University. In 1989, CBI became an organized research unit of the University.

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. In 2002, the Charles Babbage Foundation broadened its mission to support the entire IT history community. In 2007, CBF changed its name to the IT History Society and reworked its programs to better support the IT history community.

See also

• History of computing hardware
• History of operating systems
• History of the internet

References

1. ^ IT History Society’s Databases Continue to Grow, PRWeb, November 19, 2010.
2. ^ ^{a b} What's Your Tech

External links

• IT History Society website
• CBI website
• History of CBI and CBF