The Computer History Museum
Revolution: The First 2,000 Years of Computing
The story of computing is epic. It encompasses scientific breakthroughs,
high-level math, pop culture and hardball business tactics. Accidents
and luck are as important as brilliant engineering. It features
a cast worthy of Shakespeare: geniuses and scoundrels, visionaries
and garage hobbyists, failures and billionaires.
The narrative thread that holds it all together is the human
passion for tinkering, inventing and solving difficult problems.
Computing has transformed the world. More wonders are yet to
come. The mission of the Computer History Museum is to capture
the stories and artifacts of the computer age before they’re
lost, and then bring them to life.
Computer History Museum
After more than 35 years of collecting, researching, and interpreting,
the Computer History Museum brings that story of computing to
life with Revolution: The First 2,000 Years of Computing.
Revolution isn’t just for mathematicians, scientists,
engineers, and physicists; it’s for anyone who has ever
booted-up, logged on, e-mailed, texted, searched, downloaded,
friended, e-shopped, or spent quality time with tech support.
That’s almost all of us.
The Authoritative Source
Only a handful of museums worldwide are devoted to computers.
None collects, exhibits and tells the stories of the computer
revolution on the scale of the Computer History Museum. The collection
now includes more than 100,000 items including hardware, software,
still and moving images, manuals, lab papers and advertisements.
The Museum’s curators have broad experience in history,
academia, engineering, company startups, and scholarship. Working
with expert volunteers, historians, industry legends and scholars,
they have used this wide-ranging collection to create an authoritative,
multi-media exhibition for visitors to the Museum—and for
visitors online.
With the launch of Revolution: The First 2000 Years of Computing,
the Museum is now the first stop for anyone who has walked into
an electronics superstore and wondered, “Where did all
this come from?” Revolution is a milestone in
the Museum’s mission to be the world’s leading institution
devoted to exploring the history of computing and its continuing
impact on society. Music fans have rock and roll museums. Sports
fans have halls of fame. Now technology buffs from around the
world have a place to call their own.
The Stories that are Changing the World
Revolution: The First 2000 Years of Computing is a
rich, multimedia exhibition that traces the history of modern
computing. It begins with ancient efforts to make math easier
and extends through to the modern marvels of hand-held devices
and the Web.
Revolution tells the stories of computing history in
19 galleries. Each gallery is a themed mini-exhibition that covers
a particular aspect of the evolution of computing. Within each
gallery is an icon—a distinguished artifact that represents
and introduces the topic.
In all, more than 1,100 objects, some rare and one-of-a-kind,
are displayed. Not all of them are computers. A vintage Mercedes-Benz
contains the first factory-installed, computer-controlled antilock
braking system. The popular Texas Instruments Speak ‘N’ Spell
is a 1970s electronic toy that was the first device to use a
human voice stored on a single chip. A ceramic teapot was the
inspiration for innovations in computer graphics.
Revolution immerses visitors in the sights and sounds
of the computer revolution through vivid graphics, hands-on displays,
period settings, machine demonstrations, and more than 100 videos,
audio, and touch-screen stations. The Museum’s docents
are available to give tours that provide even more information.
Many are retired engineers and programmers who worked on the
legendary machines on exhibit.
The Collection
The Museum is home to the world’s largest collection
of artifacts related to the history of computing. It includes
hardware, software, documents, photographs, moving images, and
decidedly non-technical items like coffee cups, t-shirts, buttons,
pens, advertisements, brochures, and comic books. Media researchers,
intellectual property specialists, students, and others use the
collection to understand the global impact of computing.
If you want to know how computers work, you have to study the
programs that instruct them. The Museum is one of the few institutions
in the world that systematically collects, preserves, and restores
software. And makes it accessible: the Museum recently made headlines
with its acquisition and publication of the original source code
for the groundbreaking MacPaint and QuickDraw programs.
Part of the Museum’s collecting work is computer restoration.
We bring old computers “back from the dead” to better
understand historic hardware and software. Our restoration efforts
have included the DEC PDP-1, the IBM 1401, and the world’s
first disk drive, the RAMAC.
The collection is enriched by an ongoing oral history project
which now includes more than 400 videotaped oral histories of
both famous pioneers and quiet, unknown geniuses. The Museum
is fortunate that so many of the great innovators of computing
are still alive, and it is critical to collect their stories
while we still can. The men and women who blazed new trails in
computer history can tell us not only what they did, but also
how they think and how they made their discoveries. Transcripts
and, in some cases, audio and video renditions of the oral histories
are available at http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/oralhistories.
Deciding what to collect is a challenge. Computers used to
look like, well, computers. Now just about every gadget with
a plug or a battery houses a computer chip. We can’t collect
everything, so our curatorial team works hard to identify what
is important or interesting enough to preserve for all time.
They collect the artifacts that represent the major changes in
computing, the incursions of computers into new areas, and the
continuing impact of computing on society.
More about the Computer History Museum
www.ComputerHistory.org |
