The Computer History Museum Prize is awarded to the author of an outstanding book in the history of computing broadly conceived, published during the prior three years. The prize of $1,000 is awarded by SIGCIS, the Special Interest Group for Computers, Information and Society. SIGCIS is part of the Society for the History of Technology.
In 2012 the prize was endowed in perpetuity through a generous bequest from the estate of Paul Baran, a legendary computer innovator and entrepreneur best known for his work to develop and promote the packet switching approach on which modern networks are built. Baran was a longtime supporter of work on the history of information technology and named the prize to celebrate the contributions of the Computer History Museum to that field.
2026 CHM Prize Committee Members
Mar Hicks (Chair)
Iván Chaar López
Cassius Adair
Previous Winners
- 2026: Honghong Tinn, Island Tinkerers: Innovation and Transformation in the Making of Taiwan’s Computing Industry (MIT Press, 2025).
- 2025: Avery Dame Griff, The Two Revolutions: A History of the Transgender Internet (NYU Press, 2023).
- 2024: Victor Petrov, Balkan Cyberia: Cold War Computing, Bulgarian Modernization, and the Information Age behind the Iron Curtain (MIT Press, 2023).
- 2023: Kevin Driscoll, The Modem World: A Prehistory of Social Media (Yale University Press, 2022).
- 2022: Jacob Gaboury, Image Objects: An Archaeology of Computer Graphics (MIT Press, 2021).
- 2021: Morgan G. Ames, The Charisma Machine: The Life, Death, and Legacy of One Laptop per Child (MIT Press, 2019).
- 2020: Gerardo Con Diaz, Software Rights: How Patent Law Transformed Software Development in America (New Haven: Yale University Press 2019).
- 2019: Jaroslav Švelch, Gaming the Iron Curtain How Teenagers and Amateurs in Communist Czechoslovakia Claimed the Medium of Computer Games (MIT Press, 2018).
- 2018: Ben Peters, How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet (MIT Press, 2016).
- 2017: Elizabeth Petrick, Making Computers Accessible: Disability Rights and Digital Technology (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015).
- 2016: Dinesh C. Sharma, The Outsourcer: The Story of India’s IT Revolution (MIT Press, 2015)
- 2015: Rebecca Slayton, Arguments That Count: Physics, Computing, and Missile Defense, 1949-2012 (MIT Press, 2013)
- 2014: Janet Abbate, Recoding Gender: Women’s Changing Participation in Computing (MIT Press, 2012)
- 2013: Joseph A. November, Biomedical Computing: Digitizing Life in the United States (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012)
- 2012: Eden Medina, Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile (MIT Press, 2011)
- 2011: Paul N. Edwards, A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (MIT Press, 2010)
- 2010: Atsushi Akera, Calculating a Natural World: Scientists, Engineers, and Computers During the Rise of U.S. Cold War Research (MIT Press, 2007)
- 2009: Christophe Lécuyer, Making Silicon Valley: Innovation and the Growth of High Tech, 1930-1970 (MIT Press, 2006)