Main Page

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 2,600 articles, with 35,938 edits!

Basics • Hardware • Systems • Peripherals • Software • Networking
Standards • Organizations • History
Documentation • Tutorials • Other Resources

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 name, what account name you'd like, and what email address to associate with it, and I'll try and get right to it. The system will send you an email with a temporary password; if you don't see it, and I have sent you an acknowledgement, check your spam-traps: we've had issues with that. Jnc (talk) 15:33, 22 October 2017 (CEST) 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 Vertical text - There are now two templates to produce vertical text (for example, in table entries): {{VerticalTextUp|Text to go up}} and {{VerticalTextDown|Text to go down}}. In tables, you may have to use 'rowspan="N" |' attributes on those entries to create long vertical boxes for them to go in. Jnc (talk) 16:11, 6 April 2024‎ (CET) Orphans - If you look at the list of orphaned pages, we have quite a few - and I have just done a lot of work reducing the number. If you create a page, you will know it is there - but others probably will not, unless it is linked to by something else. Please make doing that a part of your routine! Jnc (talk) 22:56, 14 January 2024 (CET) Older news is here.