By Deborah O’Neil

BOSTON – In 1964, a young Patrick J. McGovern founded a small publishing company in his Newton, Mass home that would focus on the emergence of computer technology. Back then, computers were expensive, highly specialized and limited in use. Yet, the 27-year-old MIT graduate was years ahead of his time in envisioning the computer revolution, and he set out to document this transformation with the launch of his first magazine, Computerworld. His company, International Data Group or IDG, became a global publishing giant and Computerworld was its flagship publication, chronicling the history of computer technology.

More than fifty years after the launch of Computerworld, the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation has embarked on a storytelling project to share that history and trace the evolution of how computer technology has benefited society. The storytelling is led by fellow MIT Beaver Kathleen Esfahany, an undergraduate computer science major who remembers seeing Computerworld magazines around her house growing up. 

The project began in 2017, when the Foundation worked with IDG to retrieve dozens of boxes of IDG print magazines stored in a Framingham, MA warehouse. Then, the Foundation arranged for all of the issues to be preserved by the world’s digital free library, the Internet Archive. A team of archivists housed in the Boston Public Library digitally scanned Computerworld and other print publications of IDG. The issues can be viewed and downloaded as PDFs at Archive.org.

As the Foundation’s Technology and Communications Intern, Kathleen mined issues of Computerworld and developing a storytelling series that highlights technology milestones, experimentations and policy. “Poring over the Computerworld archives gave me a newfound appreciation for how greatly technological innovation has transformed society. Computers have augmented everything from voting systems to medical testing. With each story I wrote, I found myself being transported back in time and feeling amazed at the impact of technology that we take for granted today.”