Computer Industrial Archaeology

Just recently visited the new "Wellcome" wing at London's Science Museum [1]. There's a whole floor devoted to digital stuff, with lots of cool demos for the kids to play with (some of which had crashed!). Amongst all the razzamatazz such as museums seem to feel they need these days were a couple of curious artifacts: One of StevenHawking?'s speach/text systems, TimBernersLee's NeXT Cube from CERN.

Else where in the museum there are: an Apple 1 prototype (with a wooden case, quite nice), a Pilot ACE, a CRAY-1A (the last CRAY-1 in use when it was shut down, apparently), a fixed disk drive the size of a car, Babbage's DifferenceEngine No. 1, a couple of other Difference Engines, a mechanical analogue machine from the University of Manchester, and a brand new Babbage Difference Engine No. 2 that the Museum is building from Babbage's plans. Good to see all this stuff, but it's a bit thin. And none of it is doing anything.

Up at BletchleyPark is the UK's Museum of Computing. When I visited, a couple of years ago, this was just a couple of rooms piled high with kit, including a PDP-11, a few LispMachine's, an RTL mainframe (which was using all its available processing oomph to play a tune on its console buzzer), and piles and piles of other stuff. Again, good to see, but woefully underfunded. And computers are really only interesting when they're doing stuff. Which would require programmers. And programmers that can remember how to drive all that stuff.

All in all its both depressing and worrying that out industries history disappears so quickly and thoroughly. Thoughts?

I have at home a very early (pre IBM PC) MSDOS machine. The kit is complete. It is based on an Atari 400, plus an addon box called an ATR8000. That ran CP/M on a Z80 but it had an addon, which was an 8088 with 256Kbytes of memory. It has 2 5.25 inch drives and 2 8 inch drives. I would love this to be in a museum setting as I don't think there can be much earlier that ran MSDOS. -- JohnFletcher See BeforeMicrosoft)

In Signal to Noise by Bruce Bethke (http://usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?SignalToNoise), Isabel is an "information archaeologist" (or something like that), which means she dregs up old computers and tries to retrieve lost data from them. -- SunirShah