Main Page

Welcome to the Computer History Wiki!

This is the Computer History Wiki, a knowledge base about historic computers which anyone can edit. Currently, we've got 2,737 articles!

Systems • Peripherals • Software • Manufacturers • Operating Systems • Networking • Tutorials • Other Resources

For an introduction to MediaWiki syntax and Computer History Wiki conventions, 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. 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. This English wiki stems from frustration Tore Sinding Bekkedal experienced with adding information to the Norwegian Computer History Society wiki when he realized that his content would only be accessible to those who understood Norwegian. 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 knowedge may be. We realize that there are more specific wikis for Commodore and Amiga and so on, but this is a general wiki for everything related to historical computing; it is meant to be all encompassing. The current URL is temporary as this is an experiment to see if people will actually make edits and find it useful. If it "catches on" as we suspect it will, Tore will of course register a domain with an appropriate name. The threshold for "catches on" is quite low - as a worst case scenario, this becomes a one-user Content Management System -- Tore & Lucky 16:11, 16 May 2007 (PDT)

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)