Willigot T. Odhner may not be on the top of your Halloween Costume lists - he may not even be someone you have heard of before, but 121 years ago Willigot T. Odhner was granted a patent for a calculating machine that performed multiplications by a process of repeated addition.

This is just one of a year’s worth of historical tidbits that can be found on the Computer History Museum’s online calendar.

For copyright reasons I cannot display Willigot T. Odhner’s image here, but it does appear on his Russian language Wikipedia page.

You can also visit sections of the website dedicated to each of the museum’s exhibits, which include a gallery of old computer marketing materials, timelines of computer, microprocessor, and internet history, and a summary of automated chess players from Wolfgang von Kempelen’s Turk (a fraud of a chess playing machine, but a wonder of marketing and propaganda) through Deep Blue’s victory over David Kasparov in 1997, and a timeline of the internet.

However, it should be noted that the Computer History Museum is a place to look into the computer’s past, not it’s future.

Facebook and Twitter do not have a presence on the Computer History Museum website, but that may change as they and other social media sites continue to pervade online territory and entrench their presence.

For those of you interested in visiting the Computer History Museum, it is located in the heart of Silicon Valley at 1401 North Shoreline Boulevard in Mountain View, CA.

The museum is open from Noon to 4 PM on Wednesdays, Thursdays, Fridays, and Sundays, and from 11 AM to 5 PM on Saturdays.

Every Day is This Day

Not October 29th?  That’s a-okay.  Whatever today’s date is, the Computer History Museum has a tidbit for you.