Not Just Your Basic Museum

The computer industry has come of age: it now has its own museum. Appropriately enough, the museum, the only one of its kind in the world, is not to be found in the California computer hub of "Silicon Valley," but within confines of Route 128 in historical Boston.

Simply called "The Computer Museum" and located on Boston's waterfront, the museum had its grand opening on Tuesday, with a scissor-wielding robot cutting the perforated computer ribbon. Officials say the museum's purposes is to show the general public how computers were developed, how they work, and what they can do.

The museum contains exhibits on landmark machines such as the UNIVAC, the first American commercial computer, and the largest computer ever built, a 175-ton mammoth used in the U.S. Air Force air defense system.

The museum also features the ancestor of all video games, "Spacewar! ," developed by MIT students in 1962, and the computer used in the capsule of the Apollo spacecraft.

Museum officials say they expect a diverse group of visitors, and for this reason the museum serves a dual purpose. "The museum is an antiquarian society and a hands-on educational centre," explains Exhibits Operations Manager Katherine Schwartz.

Meredith T. Stelling '82, the exhibits director, adds that, while the museum tries to satisfy "high-tech" audiences who provided much of the support, financial and otherwise, needed to develop the museum, the exhibits are generally geared toward the general public.

Some exhibits, for example, explain to the novice how a computer works and give him hands on experience. While one exhibit shows how the "magnetic core" memory of a computer operates, another has a voice synthesizer that can speak any sentence typed on its keyboard. Still other exhibits allow visitors to do sophisticated image processing on a picture of their own faces.

Computer Money

Support from individuals and corporations in the computer industry is crucial to the museum's success, says Development Director Michael N. Oleksiw. Coporate gifts have not always been forthcoming because of the difficulty in getting a new industry to donate to a museum and because many of the more recent companies are just beginning to define their policies on charitable donations, Olekisw explains.

The Computer Museum, however, has had better luck. Having begun its $10 million fund drive in May, it had already amassed 21 percent of the total by this week's opening ceremony.

The museum has succeeded in attracting funds by acting as a show-case for corporations' success and technological expertise. "A lot of these people have big egos and it's an opportunity for them to show the world what great advances they have made." Oleksiw says.

Museum Movies

Film and video clips also supplement many of the exhibits visitors to the museum to see, for example, amusing movies of awe-struck people faced with the first computers. One videotape shows Walter Cronkite describing how "that marvelous electronic brain," the UNIVAC, made early election predictions in the 1952 Eisenhower election.

Serveral purely historical exhibits supported by film and video shorts recall the important transition from single-user computer, which programmers had to wait in line to use, to multi-user computer, which were first developed in the sixties. In the past writing a program meant coding it entirely by hand, making it computer-readable by creating large stacks of punched cards, then waiting for a slot of time or turn it on the computer. If the program had an error, the same process had to be repeated all over again.

One of these historical exhibits recreates the office of the all-powerful computer operator, his desk littered with desperate notes from programmes pleading for an earlier slot of computer time.

On the same topic, a comical film from the sixties shows a harried programmer rushing to run his program before he has to meet his girlfriend. Using the early cumbersome and time-consuming programming system, the "hacker" fails hears a voice telling him to try the new system, in which a programmer interacts directly with the computer to write his code. Using this system, he writes the program easily, it runs perfectly, and in the end he meets the girl.

Exhibits like these are likely to impress the computer hacker, who will feel for the hardships of the early computer programmers and appreciate the p2ogress that has been made. The computer illiterate person, whose dealings with computers are limited to the use of an automatic teller machine, however, may fail to grasp such subtle advances.

In the Beginning

Computer pioneers at the Digital Equipment Corporation in Marlboro, Mass, started the museum in 1971 because, museum officials explain, these nostalgic executives felt a responsibility to preserve the remnants of the heroic days of computers. First nothing more than a jumbled collection of old computer machinery in the company headquarters, the collection became, in 1979, the Digital Computer Museum, whose first visitors came to see this smaller exhibit of the early stumbling of the Information Age.

In an effort to represent the industry as a whole and reach a larger audience, the museum declared itself a non-profit organization, changed its name, then abandoned its offices at Digital to move too its present location on Museum Wharf.

Since leaving the Digital nest, the museum staff, like the visitors, has diversified. The people behind the today's exhibits are not the computer specialists one might imagine. In fact, many of the workers at the museum, most of them just out of college, had little previous experience with computers or with the design of museums.

Starting with little knowledge about computers, Stelling supervised the conception, design and construction of all exhibits. "When I took AS11 [Applied Sciences 11. "Introduction to Computing" I at Harvard, I was totally paranoid about computers," she says, "One of the reasons I got involved was to help people overcome their fears about computers. They're just tools," she adds.

Stelling believes that the relative inexperience of the museum developers was no hindrance to their task. "A lot of people came in here, really worked hard, and had great ideas," she says.

One such neophyte is Gregory W. Welch '85-6, one of several Harvard students to work at the museum. Though he had minimal previous experience of computers, the History of Science major took last years off to design several exhibits on computing in the sixties.

There is enough to keep the museum developers busy. In particular, some of the exhibits were unfinished at the time of the inauguration, the museum's spacious location leaves room for expansion, and the fast-moving computer industry will make some of the current exhibits obsolete a year from now. In addition to the museum's permanent collection. Stelling plans to establish a traveling exhibit about computer issues and history. The museum also has plans to develop jointly with the Boston Computer Society a "computer discovery center" to help the general public understand computers in a relaxed atmosphere.