Back in October 2010, I was interviewed for the Computer History Museum‘s new exhibit, Revolution: The First 2000 Years of Computing, and then in November I was invited to a pre-opening tour of the exhibit, which was enormously fun. The exhibit wasn’t finished yet, so much of it was still in shrink-wrap, and most of the title cards said things like, “38 word description goes here”, but that actually made it more fun: not only did we get to see all these amazing old artfacts, but we got to peek behind the curtain and see how you build a museum exhibit, which was really interesting in its own right.
The exhibit opened to the public in January 2011, but somehow I hadn’t gotten around to visiting again until November, so here are two sets of photos, taken a year apart.
Their fully functional Difference Engine is truly a marvel. Make sure you see it being demonstrated! The sounds it makes are incredible.
There’s a short clip with me in the “Art of Writing Software” movie, and I show up in at least one of the smaller video kiosks talking about what programming is like. (You can see the DNA Lounge logo in the background! Yay! But they misspelled my name on the kiosk! Boo!)
It really is a great museum. Its easy to spend many hours there. You should give them money and artifacts.
We are trying to get the computer history museum to display the first Arduino, there’s only a year or so (maybe) until 1m units are out in the wild!
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