Join us on Wednesday 26 June 2019 at noon Pacific for the Preserving Computer History Hack Chat with Dag Spicer!
In our age of instant access to the seeming total of human knowledge at the swipe of a finger, museums may seem a little anachronistic. But the information available at our fingertips is often only the tip of the iceberg, and institutions like the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California are dedicated to collecting and preserving the artifacts of the information age, capturing the intellectual capital that went into making them, and perhaps more importantly, providing context and making everything accessible.
The CHM is an incredible resource for anyone doing research involving the early days of computing. Dag Spicer is the Senior Curator at CHM, or “Chief Content Officer” as he likes to put it. Dag has been collecting, cataloging, and overseeing the largest collection of computer artifacts in the world for almost 25 years, and he has some stories to tell. He’ll stop by the Hack Chat this week to share them, and to answer your questions about the history of computers and how studying the past shapes the future of computing.
Our Hack Chats are live community events in the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday June 26 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have got you down, we have a handy time zone converter.
Click that speech bubble to the right, and you’ll be taken directly to the Hack Chat group on Hackaday.io. You don’t have to wait until Wednesday; join whenever you want and you can see what the community is talking about.
Hopefully they have a better fire suppression system than a certain other museum.
Centralized rare stuff has always been a very bad idea… it’s just a stupid SPOF…
Personally I think a lot of computer history is best preserved through “re-enactment” when ever possible. Small ( or not so small) communities of people should deliberately develop and preserve technology of a specific era and actually make new versions of the ancient pieces of tech and use them too as a kind of living history exhibit, sort of like the various islands for each year in “Rudolph’s Shiny New Year”. What a great way to encourage diversity in our culture, so much better than everyone chasing after the latest and greatest tech while dumping whatever has fallen out of style. …time to bask in the neon beauty of nixie tubes and center myself. :-) Nearly all regularly used technology is impressive, whether it’s beating rocks together until sharp edges can be made or making powerful fusion reactors where zones of less than 4 kelvin are just a few centimeters away from other zones in the millions of degrees.
This is one of the better museums on the west coast. It contains an amazing array of artifacts, not just a bunch of interpretive story boards so many “museums” use. You get a very good sense of the progress we have made.
I’m thinking this might be a good place to mention the Retro Computing Forum – other forums exist, of course, but this one is most like a computer museum. Civil discussion about historical computers and computer history. http://retrocomputingforum.com
Civil discussions on the Internet? What witchcraft is this?