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Welcome to the Computer History Wiki!

This is the Computer History Wiki ('CHWiki', for short), a knowledge base about historic computers which anyone can join in order to edit!

(Due to past problems with spam, anonymous editing and automatic account creation have had to be disabled; you'll have to contact an admin to get an account - see below.)

Currently, we've got 2,726 articles, with 38,127 edits!

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For an introduction to Computer History Wiki conventions, and MediaWiki syntax (if you want to help add content), please see Help.

Introduction by the Administrators This wiki is an experiment to create a means for knowledgeable people to enter their information into some kind of a knowledge base. This is however, not the relatively formalized tone and style imposed by Wikipedia; we also don't require the detailed sourcing that Wikipedia does. Sentences starting with "I seem to recall" are perfectly welcome here - and articles do not have to be in the descriptive, encyclopedic style Wikipedia enforces. On the contrary, it is preferred that many of the articles be references, guides, helpful hints, suggestions, tutorials and so on. If you have any information you want to contribute to this wiki, please, contribute it. We'd much rather remove or modify a dozen potentially unsuited submissions than miss out on a single good one. We hope this wiki grows into a useful resource for everyone interested in classic computing, no matter what their level of knowledge may be; it is meant to be all-encompassing. -- Tore & Lucky 16:11, 16 May 2007 (PDT) Getting an account As mentioned, due to past problems with spam, you need an account to edit, and admins have to manually create accounts. Tore, who handles requests for accounts filed via the system, is often busy, but I too am happy to create accounts - just email me (jnc at alum dot mit dot edu). Please let me know your real name (I personally do not like the anonymity which has become the fashion on the Internet; I think it's a big factor in it's current toxicity), what account name you'd like, and what email address to associate with it (preferably not GMail, as it currently won't accept email from here), and I'll try and get right to it. The system will then normally automatically send you an email with a temporary password; if you used GMail, I'll have to manually send you a temporary password, which you can later change. (Go to 'Preferences' (in the upper right hand corner), and then to 'Change password'.) If you don't see the automatic message, and I have sent you an acknowledgement, check your spam-traps: we've had issues with that. Jnc (talk) 12:49, 17 September 2025 (UTC) Need Ideas? If you're not sure what to add, the Wanted pages page (also available through a link in the top left-hand corner) is always a good place to start! If you have any expertise in any of them, please weigh in! Jnc (talk) 21:44, 2 August 2017 (CEST) The other thing you could do is fill out a stub article. (These are articles that need improving, by having more information added to them. They're a perfectly good start for a great article, they just haven't grown up yet.) You can find a list of them here. Jnc (talk) 23:10, 17 December 2018 (CET) Admin Services Tore has added me to the admin group, and I have considerable experience as an admin on Wikipedia, so if anyone needs anything which requires admin status (e.g. merging histories for duplicate articles, deleting article names with typos, etc, etc) please let me know. Jnc (talk) 14:18, 25 July 2017 (CEST)

News 'Security' Category - I have created a new 'top-level' category, Category:Security, because some new stuff didn't seem to have a natural home in the existing system. Or perhaps I should have promoted Category:Theory to the top level, and made 'Security' a sub-category of that? Although some things that should go in 'Security', like HTTPS, aren't really theory, so maybe it's right for it to be at the top level? Comment at Category talk:Security. Jnc (talk) 13:19, 15 October 2026 (UTC) Another external links update - After a very long haul of slogging through External links search I have found, and fixed, all the links to Manx-docs.org/collections/. (In doing so, I found and fixed a few other broken ones, too.) In the course of that, I found that a fairly complete collection of almost all the sets of MDS documents, at Filibeto.org (as described in DEC manuals). As I opined previously, I think that Linking to Bitsavers is still, I feel, to be preferred over the use of almost all other external sources for documents to link to, because Bitsavers is associated with the Computer History Museum, which is a fairly substantial institution, and thus less likely to vanish with no warning (as several other collections/sites did). So, if there is a choice between two copies of something, one on a personal site, and the other on Bitsavers, the one on Bitsavers should always be preferred, I reckon. Jnc Jnc (talk) 13:19, 15 October 2026 (UTC) Older news is here.