MOTAL Partners with​Personal Computing Museum!Enjoy a Speaker Series with CGU’s​Paul Gray Museum

A New Partnership
We are excited to announce a new partnership between MOTAL and the Paul Gray Personal Computing Museum of Claremont Graduate University! Former MOTAL intern and Loren Doll Scholar, Allison Koehler, is currently serving as the museum’s second executive director, and is pleased to share several upcoming projects.


Virtual Speaker Series
As director, Allison’s primary focus has been to develop the public programming and education departments of the Paul Gray PC Museum. Last Fall, the museum launched Decoding the Past: Conversations with PC Innovators, a conversational speaker series with key players in the personal computer revolution. Each engagement within this series is designed to appeal to a broad audience, examining the ways in which personal computing has evolved, and how PC impacts our lives. The diversity of the audiences and the depth of the conversations speak to the success of the museum’s transdisciplinary collaboration between CGU’s Center for Information Systems and Technology and the School of Arts and Humanity, and to the value of cross-museum partnerships such as this.

We hosted our first event in September 2020 with Jack Nilles, internationally known as the father of telework and telecommuting. Our second event, in December, featured Dan Bricklin, inventor of VisiCalc, the first electronic spreadsheet. Our most recent event in February featured Adele Goldberg, who co-developed the programming language Smalltalk-80 as principal scientist and laboratory manager at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). Among the myriad topics discussed in these events, technology in education was a recurring theme. Jack Nilles reflected upon the merits and drawbacks of telework and telecommuting as compared to distance learning in the context of the global pandemic. Adele Goldberg spoke to her work with AgileMind, Inc., an educational technology company she helped form to enhance both equity and high achievement in secondary school math and science. You can see recordings of these events on our website here.

Dan Bricklin

Adele Goldberg

The next event in Decoding the Past: Conversations with PC Innovators, will feature technology journalist, Walt Mossberg, will be held September 21, 2021 at 2:00pm PT on Zoom. From 1991 through 2013, Walt Mossberg was the principal technology columnist for the Wall Street Journal. You can register to attend this free event here. The majority of this event will be dedicated to a conversation with the audience, so bring your thoughts and questions! We hope to see you there.

Walt Mossberg, technology journalist

Look to the future!
We are excited for all that will come of this partnership. Be on the lookout for more collaborative projects and programming!

Submitted by
Alison Koehler
Executive Director
CGU'S Paul Gray Personal Computing Museum
Former MOTAL Intern and Doll Scholar ​