March 30, 2011
Bangkok (AFP) -After a two year, $19 million renovation, the Computer History Museum re-opened its doors with a new 25,000 square foot exhibit called Revolution: The First 2000 Years of Computing.
The exhibit features over 1,000 artifacts and 100 multimedia stations that explores every major aspect of the history of computing, from the abacus to the smart phone, and every step in between.
In the past, computers were men and women sitting at office desks calculating by hand, and this resulted in slow and boring work.
In the mid 1800s, Victorian scientist Charles Babbage overcame an error-filled book of navigation tables by designing his own Analytical Engine: a
programmable computer to calculate without error (as cited at
http://www.computerhistory.org).
With software programs, machines have been turned into a network of ATMs, mobile phones, airplane simulators, the World Wide Web and so on. Of course, one thing they have in common is that they all are computers.
Mainframes which used to be heavy computers and took many days or hours to do tasks have been developed to become smaller, thinner and faster computers nowadays.
Established in 1996 in California, the Computer History Museum is to preserve and present artifacts as well as stories of the information age, according to wikipedia website.
In 1999, most of the closed Computer Museum's collections in Boston were sent to Moffett Field, California. At first, it was the West Coast division of the
Computer and the Computer Museum History Center. Then, it was renamed in 2001.
The Computer History Museum covers the most significant and largest computers such as Cray-1, Cray-2 and Cray-3 supercomputers. Other rare and one-off artifacts include the Apple I, Utah teapot as well as the 1969 Neiman Marcus Kitchen Computer, according to wikipedia website.
