and tangibly support Babbage’s reputation as a computing pioneer.
Examples of both types of machine
are on display, including Babbage’s
original trial piece for the Difference
Engine No. 1, a portion of the mill of
the Analytical Engine, and the first
completed engine, the Difference Engine No. 2, built by the museum in
1991 for the 200 centenary of Babbage’s
birth. With over 4,000 parts, and weighing five tons, the machine can calculate
numbers up to 31 digits long.
The Science Museum’s displays
also reflect Britain’s role at the forefront of computing research in the
1940s and as central to the creation
of a new global computing industry in the 1950s. During this period,
Britain created the digital, electronic
computer, the code-breaking Colossus machine (1943), the first stored-program computer, the Manchester
Baby (1948), and the first business
computer, the Lyons LEO (1951). Artifacts from all of these machines are
on display in the Computing Gallery.
The Science Museum’s galleries
also showcase three important complete computers from this pioneering industry: the Pilot ACE computer
(1950), embodying the original ideas
of the mathematician Alan Turing
and his conceptual discovery of the
general-purpose machine; the Ferranti Pegasus (1959), which was fast and
reliable and is now the oldest working
electronic computer in the world; and
ERNIE (1957), the first random-num-ber generator for the national Premium Bonds that used a hybrid of valves
and transistors and generated physical random events through a series of
neon gas diodes.
Contemporary machines on display
in our Making the Modern World gallery
include the Cray 1-A supercomputer
(circa 1976) and an Apple 1 (1976).
Displayed side by side, the research
machine (the Cray was installed at Aldermaston Atomic Weapons Establishment in England) and the Apple kit
home computer built by enthusiasts
provide a strong message about the
shift to personal computing during the
late 1970s.
Since its founding, the museum has
always had a remit to display contemporary science and technology alongside its historical collections. In doing
the science
museum’s collections
celebrate computing
as one of the
most important
technologies of
our time.
so it has presented new computing
technologies using art and interactive
elements, through a computer arts
booth (1975) and exhibitions like The
Challenge of the Chip (1980). Today,
visitors flock to view Listening Post by
Ben Rubin and Mark Hassan, an art installation that presents a dynamic and
visually enticing portrait of Internet
communication.
In addition to the public galleries, the Science Museum Library and
The collections in Swindon offer
original scientific and technical books
and journals, alongside computing
archives of important historical interest. These include the personal papers
and technical drawings of Charles
Babbage, Mike Woodger from the National Physical Laboratory, and Stanley
Gill, who was significant in early U.K.
computing policy.
The Archives Collection holds a
range of computer literature, most
notably through the ICL archive that
contains significant information about
the products and history of the merged
companies that became ICL, including
British Tabulating Machine, Powers-Samas, ICT, and English Electric.
The Science Museum Library collection also holds trade literature specific
to a particular machine, installation, or
company.
Tilly Blyth ( tilly.blyth@sciencemuseum.org.uk) is the
curator of computing and information at the science
museum in london, u.k.
the Deutches museum
Hartmut Petzold
The Deutsches Museum is one of the
world’s biggest and oldest museums
for science and technology, today with
approximately 1. 3 million visitors a
year. Founded in 1903 as a “Museum
of Masterpieces of Science and Technology,” in 1906 Kaiser Wilhelm II
placed the foundation stone for the
new museum building on an island
in the Isar river in the Bavarian capital
Munich; the museum was completed
and opened in 1925. The fundamental
idea, which continues influencing the
museum, involves presenting the newest “masterpieces” as a logical and historical extension of their precursors.
From the very beginning this conception has been both criticized and also
copied in many ways.
Planning the exhibition “
Informatik” (English translation: computer
science) began in 1983. At that time,
there were only some experts knowing
the Internet, and the personal computer was an expensive and special device. The “Informatik” exhibit opened
in 1988; the initiator of the exhibition
project was Professor Friedrich L. Bauer, who involved many university- and
academic-based experts and collaborators. Bauer, as a mathematician and
co-founder of computer science as a
new academic discipline, had no difficulties presenting the historical instruments and machines as ancestors
of the computer.
The museum’s exhibition room
borders on the exhibitions on microelectronics, telecommunication, and
geodetics. It is subdivided into cabinet-like thematic units by numerous walls
providing explanatory text. Therefore
visitors do not typically initially notice
that the middle of the hall is marked
by Konrad Zuse’s early program controlled calculators Z3 and Z4. The Z4’s
original parts are presented in the same
condition as they were in 1955, when
they were used at the ETH Zurich. The
Z3, representing Zuse’s priority as the
inventor and builder of the first free
programmable automatic calculator,
working in 1941, and anticipating an
essential part of John von Neumann’s
classical computer concept from 1945,
is a reconstruction, built by Zuse himself from 1961–1962 (the original