Ground control to Pavek Museum, can you hear me? To commemorate the launching of Artemis II and the start of a new moon mission by NASA, we decided to write about the history of electronic communication in space. Did you know that the start of the space race was...

Edwin Howard Armstrong was born December 18th, 1890, in a working class neighborhood of New York City. Chelsea, famous for being near Hell’s Kitchen and the meat packing district, was dominated by Irish immigrants during this period. Edwin was the eldest of three...

When Michael W. Davidson settled into his workday at Florida State University’s Optical Microscope Laboratory in the late 1990s, his view typically involved crystalline images of DNA structures and hormone molecules - complex, elegant, and purely scientific. But one...

There’s a new, exciting sci-fi drama on Netflix that has captured the imagination of this Curator: The Eternaut. First created by Argentine comic book writer Héctor Germán Oesterheld and illustrator Francisco Solano López, The Eternaut is a deep story with important...

In 1981, Adam Osborne, a British computer designer, announced his new product, the Osborne I. Initially, people at the West Coast Computer Fair were unimpressed. Even though it was announced as the first portable computer, it seemed bulky, and the screen was too...

Have you heard of shortwave radio? Spanning the 2-30 MHz wireless frequencies, shortwave has been part of radio history since its infancy with Guglielmo Marconi in the 1920s. Shortwave can bounce signals off the ionosphere, allowing it to travel around the globe,...

Picture this: 1830s United States, Jackson Administration. The U.S. is at a turning point, pulled by two forces that are polarizing the country and pushing it to the brink of destruction. On the one hand, the expansion to the West was impaired by treaties with the...

You’ve probably heard of and even used VHS. How about Betamax or Video High Density (VHD)? The latter is a rare Japanese format that had very limited use, which is why you probably haven’t heard of it. Imagine a world where watching family memories is extremely...

That man has been called “The Father of Modern Science Fiction,” also known as Hugo Gernsback. Let’s talk about how he motivated millions of people not only to tinker and invent but also to imagine better futures for these technologies. If you are not a science...

October 2024 Minnesota may not be the first place that comes to mind when discussing computer innovation. However, from the 1950s to the late 1980s, Minnesota served as an incubator for groundbreaking technological advancements in computing. Surprisingly, the origin...