The origins of this project stem from the Charles River Museum’s core mission - to inspire future innovation and to preserve and share the history of American industry and technological advancement. The Museum is housed in the Francis Cabot Lowell mill complex, a National Historic Landmark District where the Boston Manufacturing Company built the world’s first modern factory, first industrialized labor force, and first modern private corporation. We tell the stories of entrepreneurs, workers, and innovators who changed the way America lives and works, and continue to do so today.

Our conversations with innovators, catalysts, and tech pioneers connected to the digital revolution is a way to record this story for future scholarship and to preserve a record of how individuals built a transformational movement, and what we might learn from it as we move forward. These interviews will be included in our permanent research archive available to future scholars studying the explosion in innovation that happened here in the past 50 years.

The goal isn’t to create an exhaustive play-by-play record of what happened. It’s to give the story greater depth and to tell a broader story of a society developing and working with rapidly advancing technological innovation, just as we will continue to do so now and in the future