For the past 18 months, I have been working with Designing for the Future, alumnus, Pete Barr, on refreshing the website for the Michael Aldrich Archive.
My father, Michael Aldrich (for whom the Michael Aldrich Foundation is named) was a pioneer of online shopping in the 1980s before the internet was born.
He worked in the Information Technology industry for 38 years from 1962 to 2000 when computers moved from the size of small houses to the size of a thumbnail, from batch monoprogramming using punched card files to real-time interactive world- wide networks with gigabyte disk storage in the laptop and from doing not a great deal to being ubiquitous.
The Michael Aldrich Archive is a unique record of this period, consisting mainly of original material from Michael Aldrich’s personal papers, materials from the company he founded and his own later narrative.
In these strange times, when being able to order online has become so important to people isolating at home, it is interesting to look back on where the idea came from, how the processes and infrastructure were developed and meet the world’s first online shopper, Mrs Snowball.
To visit the Michael Aldrich Archive website, click HERE