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The Computer Museum was a
On November 13, 1984, the museum officially re-opened to the public at its new 53,000 square foot location. The initial set of exhibits featured the pioneering Whirlwind Computer, the SAGE computer room, an evolutionary series of computers built by
Boston
Boston (), officially the City of Boston, is the state capital and most populous city of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, as well as the cultural and financial center of the New England region of the United States. It is the 24th- mo ...
, Massachusetts
Massachusetts (Massachusett: ''Muhsachuweesut Massachusett_writing_systems.html" ;"title="nowiki/> məhswatʃəwiːsət.html" ;"title="Massachusett writing systems">məhswatʃəwiːsət">Massachusett writing systems">məhswatʃəwiːsət'' En ...
, museum that opened in 1979 and operated in three locations until 1999. It was once referred to as TCM and is sometimes called the Boston Computer Museum. When the museum closed and its space became part of Boston Children's Museum
Boston Children's Museum is a children's museum in Boston, Massachusetts, dedicated to the education of children. Located on Children's Wharf along the Fort Point Channel, Boston Children's Museum is the second oldest children's museum in the Un ...
next door in 2000, much of its collection was sent to the Computer History Museum
The Computer History Museum (CHM) is a museum of computer history, located in Mountain View, California. The museum presents stories and artifacts of Silicon Valley and the information age, and explores the computing revolution and its impact o ...
in California
California is a state in the Western United States, located along the Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the most populous U.S. state and the 3rd largest by area. It is also the m ...
.
History
The Digital Computer History Museum
TheDigital Equipment Corporation
Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC ), using the trademark Digital, was a major American company in the computer industry from the 1960s to the 1990s. The company was co-founded by Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson in 1957. Olsen was president un ...
(DEC) Museum Project began in 1975 with a display of circuit and memory hardware in a converted lobby closet of DEC's Main (Mill) Building 12 in Maynard, Massachusetts
Maynard is a town in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States. The town is located 22 miles west of Boston, in the MetroWest and Greater Boston region of Massachusetts and borders Acton, Concord, Stow and Sudbury. The town's population ...
. In September 1979, with the assistance of Digital Equipment Corporation, Gordon and Gwen Bell founded the Digital Computer Museum in a former RCA
The RCA Corporation was a major American electronics company, which was founded as the Radio Corporation of America in 1919. It was initially a patent trust owned by General Electric (GE), Westinghouse, AT&T Corporation and United Fruit Comp ...
building in Marlboro, Massachusetts
Marlborough is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States. The population was 41,793 at the 2020 census. Marlborough became a prosperous industrial town in the 19th century and made the transition to high technology industry in the ...
. Though entirely funded by DEC and housed within a corporate facility, from its inception the museum's activities were ecumenical, with an industry-wide, international preservation mission.
In spring 1982, the museum received non-profit charitable foundation status from the Internal Revenue Service
The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is the revenue service for the United States federal government, which is responsible for collecting U.S. federal taxes and administering the Internal Revenue Code, the main body of the federal statutory t ...
. In Fall 1983, The Computer Museum, which had dropped "Digital" from its title, decided to relocate to Museum Wharf
Children's Wharf (until recently known as Museum Wharf) is a wharf on Congress Street in Boston, Massachusetts, on the Fort Point Channel with views of the Financial District and Boston Harbor. The wharf has sitting areas, patches of lawn, and se ...
in downtown Boston, sharing a renovated wool warehouse with Boston Children's Museum
Boston Children's Museum is a children's museum in Boston, Massachusetts, dedicated to the education of children. Located on Children's Wharf along the Fort Point Channel, Boston Children's Museum is the second oldest children's museum in the Un ...
. Oliver Strimpel, recruited from the Science Museum
A science museum is a museum devoted primarily to science. Older science museums tended to concentrate on static displays of objects related to natural history, paleontology, geology, industry and industrial machinery, etc. Modern trends in ...
in London
London is the capital and List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary dow ...
, was appointed to develop a major exhibit on computer graphics and image processing, later being appointed executive director in 1990.
On November 13, 1984, the museum officially re-opened to the public at its new 53,000 square foot location. The initial set of exhibits featured the pioneering Whirlwind Computer, the SAGE computer room, an evolutionary series of computers built by Seymour Cray
Seymour Roger Cray (September 28, 1925 – October 5, 1996
) was an American
The museum's collections were jump-started with the collections of Gordon and Gwen Bell, who had been actively collecting since the 1970s. To bring structure and discipline to collecting efforts, an acquisitions policy was developed in which computing materials were classified into Processor, Memory, and Switch categories, known as the PMS classification.
The Transducer category was also added to cover input/output devices.
The museum actively collected artifacts throughout its history, though acquisition criteria became more selective over time owing to increasingly adherence to collecting criteria and severely limited storage space. Acquired artifacts ranged in size from a single chip to the multiple components of a single mainframe computer. In addition to artifacts, the museum collected images, film, and video.
Noteworthy early acquisitions included parts of Whirlwind 1, UNIVAC 1, the TX-0, a CPU from the Burroughs ILLIAC IV, IBM 7030 "Stretch", NASA Apollo Guidance Computer Prototype, a CDC 6600, a CRAY-1, PDP-1, PDP-8, EDSAC Storage Tube, Colossus pulley, and components of the Ferranti Atlas, and the Manchester Mark I.
In June 1984, the collection of artifacts and films numbered 900 cataloged items. Examples of acquisitions of computers in the preceding year included an Apple 1, Burroughs B-500, Digital Equipment Corp. PDP-1, Franklin Ace 100, and IBM SAGE: AN/FSQ-7 components.The Computer Museum Report, Fall 1984
Several types of memory were acquired, including core memory, plasma cell memory, rope memory, selectron tube, magnetic cards, mercury delay line, and fixed-head drum. In the following years noteworthy acquisitions of computers included: Amdahl 470V/6, Apollo Domain DN100 workstation, Control Data Little Character, Data General Eclipse, Evans & Sutherland Line Drawing System-2, Osborne 1, SCELBI 8H minicomputer, and a Sinclair ZX80. To the nascent historical software collection, the first BASIC written for the Altair and VisiCalc Beta Test Version 0.1 was added. Between Fall 1995 and Spring 1996, The museum sponsored the Early Model Personal Computer Contest. A call for the earliest personal computers netted 137 additions to the collections. The judges, Steve Wozniak, David Bunnell, and Oliver Strimpel awarded prizes for the earliest machines to John V. Blankenbaker for the Kenbak-1 (1972), Robert Pond for the Altair 8800, Lee Felsenstein for the prototype
Spurred by the difficulty of preserving a fast-evolving technology built by future-oriented engineers and entrepreneurs, the museum signed a joint collecting agreement with the Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of American History to collectively ensure that important computing artifacts would be preserved. Under this 1987 agreement, a common catalog and database of both museums' collections would be created.
Static exhibits included a display of early computer graphic input and output devices, examples of digital typography, and a holographic animation of U.S. demographic evolution.
Computer graphics Static exhibits included a display of early computer graphic input and output devices, examples of digital typography, the holographic animation ''American Graph Fleeting'' and ''A Visualizer's Bestiary'', a tableau of real-world objects that have vexed programmers' attempts to render them realistically. Dynamic exhibits included: ''A Window full of Polygons'' depicting the view of downtown Boston that visitors see from the gallery on a large pen-plotter that renders the buildings' silhouettes with changing colors and patterns; an interactive Koch snowflake fractal generator; and the first computer game SPACEWAR! running on a PDP-1 and (more reliably) on a PC.The Computer Museum Report, Fall 1983
Realistic image synthesis Synthetic lighting and shading algorithms for models of three-dimensional objects have classically been tested by rendering of a teapot. In the early 1970s, Martin Newell, working at The University of Utah, decided to use his teapot as an object with which to test various modeling, lighting and shading techniques. In the summer of 1982, at the 1982 ACM SIGGRAPH conference, Martin Newell donated his original teapot to Oliver Strimpel, wryly noting the symbolism of one Englishman giving another Englishman a teapot to be preserved and displayed a stone's throw from the site of the Boston Tea Party revolt of 1773. The exhibit displayed Allan Newell's original ceramic teapot alongside an Adage frame buffer display of a Bézier model of it, both responding interactively to changes in lighting selected by museum visitors with switches. Computer animation An animation theater performed a program of pioneering computer-animated shorts, including several from
A permanent gallery devoted to the history and technology of artificial intelligence and robotics opened in 1987.
Knowledge-based systems Interactive exhibits focused on expert systems. Examples included a medical diagnosis system, a simple rule-based simulated bargaining store-keeper with whom visitors haggled over the price of a crate of strawberries, a computer composition system, and a system that plays tic-tac-toe according to a visitor-selected strategy.
Natural language understanding Visitors could sit at computers and ask questions of
A two-story-high model of a personal computer, simulated to be working interactively. 
The purpose of the exhibit was to show the anatomy of a computer and to explain how the various parts work and communicate with each other. Before entering the computer's chassis, visitors could roll a giant trackball to play "World Traveller" on the giant screen. Wall-sized graphics by David Macaulay and interactive exhibits explained how all kinds of information, from text, graphics, video, music, as well as computer programs can be represented as 1's and 0's. Inside the giant chassis, visitors walked between a wall-sized graphics card and memory card to the microprocessor, upon which a projected electron microscope imagery of a CPU's circuits in operation appeared. Further on, a RAM set of modules plugged into the motherboard included reveals showing electron microscope imagery of memory circuits, Peering into a mini-van sized hard drive, visitors could see read/write heads position themselves on either side of rotating platters.The Computer Museum Annual Report 1990The Computer Museum Annual Report 1993
Richard Fowler was recruited from The Science Museum, London/Bradford, as exhibit designer. The exhibit garnered international publicity and more than doubled visitor traffic to the museum.
The emergence of computer programming languages was featured in a milestone showing how for the first time, different computers were programmed to accept a common language - COBOL. A 1970s vignette portrayed a PDP-8 minicomputer being used backstage to control theater lighting, and applications to scientific computer were shown with a CRAY-1 at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts. A student publishing her school newspaper using a Macintosh showed the beginning of personal computing.The Computer Museum Annual Report 1991.
In this 2,200 square-foot virtual undersea world, visitors used interactive stations located in front of a giant projection display to design their own virtual fish, and then release it into the simulated fishtank. Once in the tank, the fish behaved according to the behavioral rules chosen during its design, with surprising results. Together with a set of interactive stations, the exhibit, created in conjunction with the MIT Media Lab and Nearlife, Inc., aimed to reveal how simple behavioral rules lead to distinctive emergent behavior in complex systems such as traffic flows and city demographic distributions.
*''Computer Art in Context: SIGGRAPH '89 Art Show'' – International juried selection of art involving the use of computers. *''The Computer in the Studio 1994'' – Contemporary computer art developed in conjunction with the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park. *''The Robotic Artist: AARON in Living Color 1994'' – Harold Cohen's artificial-intelligence based program autonomously painting color pictures representing rocks, plants, and people on a customized large format flat-bed plotter. *''Wizards and Their Wonders 1998'' – Photographic portraits of inventors of the Computer Age by Louis Fabian Bachrach III
After the museum closed in 1999, the Clubhouse moved to the
The Computer Museum Report, Spring 1988
Computer History MuseumVideo tour of the Computer Museum in 1985
{{DEFAULTSORT:Computer Museum 1979 establishments in Massachusetts 1999 disestablishments in Massachusetts 20th century in Boston Museums established in 1979 Museums disestablished in 1999 Computer museums in the United States Defunct museums in Boston History of Boston
) was an American
Ken Olsen
Kenneth Harry "Ken" Olsen (February 20, 1926 – February 6, 2011) was an American engineer who co-founded Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in 1957 with colleague Harlan Anderson and his brother Stan Olsen.
Background
Kenneth Harry Olsen w ...
and Mitre Corporation's Robert Everett had, in 1973, "saved Whirlwind from the scrap heap" and "arranged to exhibit it at the Smithsonian
The Smithsonian Institution ( ), or simply the Smithsonian, is a group of museums and education and research centers, the largest such complex in the world, created by the U.S. government "for the increase and diffusion of knowledge". Founded ...
." Olsen began warehousing other old computers, even as the Bells, independently, "were thinking about a computer museum" and collecting artifacts.
Computer History Museum (California)
While the majority of the museum's energies and funding were focused on the growing exhibitions and educational programs, the resources available for the historical collections remained flat. Though active collection of artifacts continued, there was a lack of suitable collections storage and study space. Furthermore, with the inexorable shift of the U.S. computer industry from Boston to the West Coast, the museum's Boston location became a handicap from the point of view of collecting as well as industry support. In 1996, a group of Computer Museum Board members established a division of the museum inSilicon Valley
Silicon Valley is a region in Northern California that serves as a global center for high technology and innovation. Located in the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area, it corresponds roughly to the geographical areas San Mateo Cou ...
exclusively devoted to collecting and preserving the history of computing. First called The Computer Museum History Center, it was housed in a storage building near Hangar One at Moffett Field
Moffett Federal Airfield , also known as Moffett Field, is a joint civil-military airport located in an unincorporated part of Santa Clara County, California, United States, between northern Mountain View and northern Sunnyvale. On November 10 ...
, California
California is a state in the Western United States, located along the Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the most populous U.S. state and the 3rd largest by area. It is also the m ...
. In 2001, it changed its name to the Computer History Museum
The Computer History Museum (CHM) is a museum of computer history, located in Mountain View, California. The museum presents stories and artifacts of Silicon Valley and the information age, and explores the computing revolution and its impact o ...
and acquired its own building in Mountain View, California
Mountain View is a city in Santa Clara County, California, United States. Named for its views of the Santa Cruz Mountains, it has a population of 82,376.
Mountain View was integral to the early history and growth of Silicon Valley, and is t ...
, in 2002.
In 1999, the Computer Museum merged with the Museum of Science, Boston
The Museum of Science (MoS) is a science museum and indoor zoo in Boston, Massachusetts, located in Science Park, a plot of land spanning the Charles River. Along with over 700 interactive exhibits, the museum features a number of live presentat ...
. When the museum closed as an independent entity in 2000, a few artifacts were moved to the Museum of Science for eventual exhibits. The historical artifact collection was sent to the Computer History Museum
The Computer History Museum (CHM) is a museum of computer history, located in Mountain View, California. The museum presents stories and artifacts of Silicon Valley and the information age, and explores the computing revolution and its impact o ...
forming the base of the museum's collection.
An extensive archive of Computer Museum documents and videos of the history of the museum, formative memos at Digital Equipment Corporation and other materials was compiled by Gordon Bell and is now maintained by The Computer History Museum. Archive sections include: exhibits, with layouts and design documents; Pioneer Lecture Series Videos; Posters; The Computer Bowl; Museum Reports and Annual Reports; and Marketing material, such as brochures, guides, leaflets, press releases, and store catalogs. A Files section contains general documents of the founding and operation of the museum from the Internet Archive
The Internet Archive is an American digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It provides free public access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, software applications/games, music, ...
, the Computer History Museum
The Computer History Museum (CHM) is a museum of computer history, located in Mountain View, California. The museum presents stories and artifacts of Silicon Valley and the information age, and explores the computing revolution and its impact o ...
, Gordon Bell
Chester Gordon Bell (born August 19, 1934) is an American electrical engineer and manager. An early employee of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) 1960–1966, Bell designed several of their PDP machines and later became Vice President of Engi ...
and Gwen Bell, and Gardner Hendrie. An illustrated timeline weaves the sections together to provide an overview.
Governance
The Computer Museum was governed by a Board of Directors, which appointed the executive director and various board committees to oversee operations and other areas such as collections, exhibits, education, and development. The following served as chairman of the board: Kenneth H. Olsen (1982–1984), John William Poduska, Sr. (1984–1988), Gardner C. Hendrie (1988–1993), Charles A. Zraket (1993–1997), and Lawrence Weber (1997–2000).Collections
The museum's collections were jump-started with the collections of Gordon and Gwen Bell, who had been actively collecting since the 1970s. To bring structure and discipline to collecting efforts, an acquisitions policy was developed in which computing materials were classified into Processor, Memory, and Switch categories, known as the PMS classification.
The Transducer category was also added to cover input/output devices.
The museum actively collected artifacts throughout its history, though acquisition criteria became more selective over time owing to increasingly adherence to collecting criteria and severely limited storage space. Acquired artifacts ranged in size from a single chip to the multiple components of a single mainframe computer. In addition to artifacts, the museum collected images, film, and video.
Noteworthy early acquisitions included parts of Whirlwind 1, UNIVAC 1, the TX-0, a CPU from the Burroughs ILLIAC IV, IBM 7030 "Stretch", NASA Apollo Guidance Computer Prototype, a CDC 6600, a CRAY-1, PDP-1, PDP-8, EDSAC Storage Tube, Colossus pulley, and components of the Ferranti Atlas, and the Manchester Mark I.
In June 1984, the collection of artifacts and films numbered 900 cataloged items. Examples of acquisitions of computers in the preceding year included an Apple 1, Burroughs B-500, Digital Equipment Corp. PDP-1, Franklin Ace 100, and IBM SAGE: AN/FSQ-7 components.The Computer Museum Report, Fall 1984Several types of memory were acquired, including core memory, plasma cell memory, rope memory, selectron tube, magnetic cards, mercury delay line, and fixed-head drum. In the following years noteworthy acquisitions of computers included: Amdahl 470V/6, Apollo Domain DN100 workstation, Control Data Little Character, Data General Eclipse, Evans & Sutherland Line Drawing System-2, Osborne 1, SCELBI 8H minicomputer, and a Sinclair ZX80. To the nascent historical software collection, the first BASIC written for the Altair and VisiCalc Beta Test Version 0.1 was added. Between Fall 1995 and Spring 1996, The museum sponsored the Early Model Personal Computer Contest. A call for the earliest personal computers netted 137 additions to the collections. The judges, Steve Wozniak, David Bunnell, and Oliver Strimpel awarded prizes for the earliest machines to John V. Blankenbaker for the Kenbak-1 (1972), Robert Pond for the Altair 8800, Lee Felsenstein for the prototype
VDM-1 The Processor Technology VDM-1, for Video Display Module, was the first video card for S-100 bus computers. Created in 1975, it allows an S-100 machine to produce its own display, and when paired with a keyboard and their 3P+S card, it eliminates ...
, Don Lancaster for the prototype TVT-1, and Thi T. Truong for the Micral.
In 1986–7, the museum acquired 27 computers, including a CDC 1604, MIT AI Lab CADR, MIT Lincoln Lab LINC, Prime Computer Model 300, Research Machines 380Z, and a Xerox Alto II. As part of the development of the Smart Machines gallery, robot collecting was especially active, with robots such as Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Institute's Direct Drive Arm I and Pluto Rover, GM Consight-I Project materials, Johns Hopkins University Adaptive Machines Group's Beast, Naval Systems International Sea Rover, and Rehabilitation Institute of Pittsburgh Page Turning Robot. The collections of Subassemblies and Components, Memories, Calculating Devices and Transducers continued to expand as well.The Computer Museum Report, Winter 1987/88Spurred by the difficulty of preserving a fast-evolving technology built by future-oriented engineers and entrepreneurs, the museum signed a joint collecting agreement with the Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of American History to collectively ensure that important computing artifacts would be preserved. Under this 1987 agreement, a common catalog and database of both museums' collections would be created.
Permanent exhibitions
The Computer and the Image (1984)
In addition to exhibits principally directed to the history of computing, the museum re-opened in 1984 with a 4,000-square-foot gallery on digital image processing and computer graphics, entitled The Computer and the Image. The exhibits addressed the history of the field, the basic principles of digital image processing and image synthesis, and applications of the technologies. The exhibition featured historical artifacts, explanatory text and images, interactive exhibits, and a computer animation theater. Many of the exhibits were developed with the help of university and corporate research labs. The exhibition was developed under the direction of Oliver Strimpel with Geoff Dutton. Digital image processing The gallery included the history, technology and applications of digital image processing. Possibly the first-ever digital image was acquired from Jet Propulsion Labs, consisting of hand-assembled colored strips of line-printer output from the Mariner 4 Mars probe (1965).
Static exhibits included a display of early computer graphic input and output devices, examples of digital typography, and a holographic animation of U.S. demographic evolution.
Computer graphics Static exhibits included a display of early computer graphic input and output devices, examples of digital typography, the holographic animation ''American Graph Fleeting'' and ''A Visualizer's Bestiary'', a tableau of real-world objects that have vexed programmers' attempts to render them realistically. Dynamic exhibits included: ''A Window full of Polygons'' depicting the view of downtown Boston that visitors see from the gallery on a large pen-plotter that renders the buildings' silhouettes with changing colors and patterns; an interactive Koch snowflake fractal generator; and the first computer game SPACEWAR! running on a PDP-1 and (more reliably) on a PC.The Computer Museum Report, Fall 1983Realistic image synthesis Synthetic lighting and shading algorithms for models of three-dimensional objects have classically been tested by rendering of a teapot. In the early 1970s, Martin Newell, working at The University of Utah, decided to use his teapot as an object with which to test various modeling, lighting and shading techniques. In the summer of 1982, at the 1982 ACM SIGGRAPH conference, Martin Newell donated his original teapot to Oliver Strimpel, wryly noting the symbolism of one Englishman giving another Englishman a teapot to be preserved and displayed a stone's throw from the site of the Boston Tea Party revolt of 1773. The exhibit displayed Allan Newell's original ceramic teapot alongside an Adage frame buffer display of a Bézier model of it, both responding interactively to changes in lighting selected by museum visitors with switches. Computer animation An animation theater performed a program of pioneering computer-animated shorts, including several from
Pixar
Pixar Animation Studios (commonly known as Pixar () and stylized as P I X A R) is an American computer animation studio known for its critically and commercially successful computer animated feature films. It is based in Emeryville, Californ ...
, such as Luxo Jr.
Smart Machines (1987)
A permanent gallery devoted to the history and technology of artificial intelligence and robotics opened in 1987.
Knowledge-based systems Interactive exhibits focused on expert systems. Examples included a medical diagnosis system, a simple rule-based simulated bargaining store-keeper with whom visitors haggled over the price of a crate of strawberries, a computer composition system, and a system that plays tic-tac-toe according to a visitor-selected strategy.
Natural language understanding Visitors could sit at computers and ask questions of ELIZA
ELIZA is an early natural language processing computer program created from 1964 to 1966 at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory by Joseph Weizenbaum. Created to demonstrate the superficiality of communication between humans and machines, ...
, the automated psychotherapist that was noteworthy because despite its basic rule-based behavior, users became deeply engaged with it. In an interactive video disk system, visitors were invited to analyze the computer HAL's natural language capability in an excerpt of the Stanley Kubrick
Stanley Kubrick (; July 26, 1928 – March 7, 1999) was an American film director, producer, screenwriter, and photographer. Widely considered one of the greatest filmmakers of all time, his films, almost all of which are adaptations of nove ...
film '' 2001: A Space Odyssey.''
Robot sensing Museum visitors could interact with four robot sensing modalities: vision, hearing, touch, and sonar. Vision: after arranging a set of simple shapes on a board, a vision system attempted to recognize them using edge detection. Hearing: this was exemplified by a speech recognition system. Touch: visitors touch a pressure-sensitive pad that outputs the distribution of pressure under their figures onto a display. Sonar: a ceiling-mounted sensor measured a visitor's height by bouncing a signal off the top of the head.
Robot Theater A collection of robots were arrayed inside a theater, each of which, when highlighted in the theater's video program, lit up and, in several cases, performed movements. Mobile robots included: Shakey Shaky or Shakey may refer to:
People Shakey
* Shakey Graves, stage name of Americana musician Alejandro Rose-Garcia (born 1987)
* Shakey Jake (1925-2007), American street musician and storyteller in Ann Arbor, Michigan
* Shakey Jake Harris (1921� ...
, Prototype Mars Rover, the Stanford Cart
Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is conside ...
, the quadruped Titan III from the Tokyo Institute of Technology, and a Denning Mobile Robot; robot arms included Unimate I, the Rancho and Stanford Arms and Orm from Stanford, the Direct Drive Arm-1 from Carnegie Mellon University, and the Tentacle Arm from MIT.
The Walk-Through Computer (1990, 1995)
A two-story-high model of a personal computer, simulated to be working interactively.
The purpose of the exhibit was to show the anatomy of a computer and to explain how the various parts work and communicate with each other. Before entering the computer's chassis, visitors could roll a giant trackball to play "World Traveller" on the giant screen. Wall-sized graphics by David Macaulay and interactive exhibits explained how all kinds of information, from text, graphics, video, music, as well as computer programs can be represented as 1's and 0's. Inside the giant chassis, visitors walked between a wall-sized graphics card and memory card to the microprocessor, upon which a projected electron microscope imagery of a CPU's circuits in operation appeared. Further on, a RAM set of modules plugged into the motherboard included reveals showing electron microscope imagery of memory circuits, Peering into a mini-van sized hard drive, visitors could see read/write heads position themselves on either side of rotating platters.The Computer Museum Annual Report 1990The Computer Museum Annual Report 1993Richard Fowler was recruited from The Science Museum, London/Bradford, as exhibit designer. The exhibit garnered international publicity and more than doubled visitor traffic to the museum.
People and Computers: Milestones of a Revolution (1991)
Through a series of nine milestones portrayed with vignettes and interactive exhibits, this permanent exhibit portrayed computing from the punched card machines of the 1930s through the ubiquitous embedded microprocessors of the 1990s. The birth of electronic computer milestone featured a piece of the 1951 Whirlwind I computer with an interactive exhibit explaining core memory. Machines for big business were exemplified by a UNIVAC I installation and an IBM System 360.
The emergence of computer programming languages was featured in a milestone showing how for the first time, different computers were programmed to accept a common language - COBOL. A 1970s vignette portrayed a PDP-8 minicomputer being used backstage to control theater lighting, and applications to scientific computer were shown with a CRAY-1 at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts. A student publishing her school newspaper using a Macintosh showed the beginning of personal computing.The Computer Museum Annual Report 1991.
Tools & Toys: The Amazing Personal Computer (1992)
The exhibition demonstrated eight application areas using some 40 computer stations. The first area, "Making Pictures" featured a Virtual Reality Chair among other interactive stations focusing on graphics. The other areas addressed writing, making sound, calculating, playing games, exploring information, and sharing ideas.The Networked Planet (1994)
Against a backdrop of the explosive growth of the Internet, this 4,000-square-foot exhibit addressed the history, technology, and applications of the growing computer network infrastructure. Exhibits included an interactive live air traffic control display, a real-time view into stock exchange transactions, and several internet stations (not commonly found in public spaces at that time) with constantly changing selections of sample web sites to reveal the diversity of Internet applications.The Virtual FishTank (1998)
In this 2,200 square-foot virtual undersea world, visitors used interactive stations located in front of a giant projection display to design their own virtual fish, and then release it into the simulated fishtank. Once in the tank, the fish behaved according to the behavioral rules chosen during its design, with surprising results. Together with a set of interactive stations, the exhibit, created in conjunction with the MIT Media Lab and Nearlife, Inc., aimed to reveal how simple behavioral rules lead to distinctive emergent behavior in complex systems such as traffic flows and city demographic distributions.
Temporary and travelling exhibits
The museum developed temporary exhibits, some of which traveled to other museums. *''BYTE Magazine Covers 1985'' – The original Robert Tinney illustrations. *''Colors of Chaos 1986'' – Brightly colored computer graphic renditions of Julia Set and Mandelbrot Set fractals. *''On One Hand...Pocket Calculators Then and Now 1987'' – From the abacus to the pocket calculator, the exhibit showed portable mechanical, electromechanical, and electronic devices. The exhibit traveled to a number of museums under the auspices of The Smithsonian travelling Exhibition Service. *''Terra Firma in Focus: The Art and Science of Digital Satellite Imagery 1988-9'' – High resolution false-colored digital images from the SPOT satellite.The Computer Museum Annual Report 1994*''Computer Art in Context: SIGGRAPH '89 Art Show'' – International juried selection of art involving the use of computers. *''The Computer in the Studio 1994'' – Contemporary computer art developed in conjunction with the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park. *''The Robotic Artist: AARON in Living Color 1994'' – Harold Cohen's artificial-intelligence based program autonomously painting color pictures representing rocks, plants, and people on a customized large format flat-bed plotter. *''Wizards and Their Wonders 1998'' – Photographic portraits of inventors of the Computer Age by Louis Fabian Bachrach III
Computer Clubhouse
In collaboration with theMIT Media Lab
The MIT Media Lab is a research laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, growing out of MIT's Architecture Machine Group in the School of Architecture. Its research does not restrict to fixed academic disciplines, but draws from ...
, The Computer Museum launched The Computer Clubhouse
The Clubhouse Network, often shortened to "The Clubhouse," is an American nonprofit organization that provides a free out-of-school learning program where children (ages 10–19) from lower income communities can work with adult mentors to explo ...
in 1993 to provide children from under-served inner city communities access to computers to learn how to use and program computers. Guided by adult mentors, children engaged in projects such as developing simulations, building and programming robots, and creating computer games. Spurred by a major grant from Intel Corp., a national and then international network of computer clubhouses was established.The Computer Clubhouse HistoryAfter the museum closed in 1999, the Clubhouse moved to the
Museum of Science, Boston
The Museum of Science (MoS) is a science museum and indoor zoo in Boston, Massachusetts, located in Science Park, a plot of land spanning the Charles River. Along with over 700 interactive exhibits, the museum features a number of live presentat ...
, which also served as the headquarters of The Computer Clubhouse Network.
Computer Bowl
In 1988, the first annual Computer Bowl was held as a fund-raising event for The Computer Museum. The concept played upon rivalries between East Coast (especially Route 128 around Boston) and West Coast (mainly Silicon Valley) technology industries. It took the form of a live and televised (usually on Stewart Cheifet's PBS series ''Computer Chronicles
''(The) Computer Chronicles'' is an American half-hour television series, which was broadcast from 1983 to 2002 on Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) public television and which documented various issues from the rise of the personal computer from ...
'') computer trivia contest between East and West Coast teams of industry and academic leaders, modeled somewhat on the '' College Bowl'' format. Between 1988 and the last Bowl held in 1998, team members included Marc Andreessen, John Doerr, Esther Dyson, Bill Gates, William "Bill" Joy, Mitchell Kapor, John Markoff, Patrick McGovern, Walt Mossberg, Nathan Myhrvold, Nicholas Negroponte, and John William Poduska.
Special events
The museum hosted a variety of special events, mostly relating to recreational computing. Examples included computer chess tournaments, partial Turing tests, World Micromouse Contest,The Computer Museum Report, Spring 1986Core War
''Core War'' is a 1984 programming game created by D. G. Jones and A. K. Dewdney in which two or more battle programs (called "warriors") compete for control of a virtual computer. These battle programs are written in an abstract assembly languag ...
contests, Computer Animation Festival, The First Internet Auction, and the 25th Anniversary of Computer Games.See also
* List of computer museumsReferences
External links
* **Computer History Museum
{{DEFAULTSORT:Computer Museum 1979 establishments in Massachusetts 1999 disestablishments in Massachusetts 20th century in Boston Museums established in 1979 Museums disestablished in 1999 Computer museums in the United States Defunct museums in Boston History of Boston