Бостон компьютер мұражайының тарихы

Former computer museum in Boston, Massachusetts

The Computer Museum was a Boston, Massachusetts, museum that opened in 1979 and operated in three locations until 1999. It was once referred to as TCM and is sometimes called the Boston Computer Museum. When the museum closed and its space became part of Boston Children's Museum next door in 2000, much of its collection was sent to the Computer History Museum in California.

The Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) Museum Project began in 1975 with a display of circuit and memory hardware in a converted lobby closet of DEC's Main (Mill) Building 12 in Maynard, Massachusetts. In September 1979, with the assistance of Digital Equipment Corporation, Gordon and Gwen Bell founded the Digital Computer Museum in a former RCA building in Marlboro, Massachusetts. Though entirely funded by DEC and housed within a corporate facility, from its inception the museum's activities were altruistic, with an industry wide, international preservation mission. In spring 1982, the museum received non profit charitable foundation status from the Internal Revenue Service. In Fall 1983, The Computer Museum, which had dropped "Digital" from its title, decided to relocate to Museum Wharf in downtown Boston, sharing a renovated wool warehouse with Boston Children's Museum. Oliver Strimpel, recruited from the Science Museum in London, Also among the opening exhibits was a permanent gallery devoted to the history, technology, and applications of digital imaging entitled The Computer and the Image. Prior to all of this, DEC's Ken Olsen and Mitre Corporation's Robert Everett had, in 1973, "saved Whirlwind from the scrap heap" and "arranged to exhibit it at the Smithsonian." Olsen began warehousing other old computers, even as the Bells, independently, "were thinking about a computer museum" and collecting artifacts. and Marketing material, such as brochures, guides, leaflets, press releases, and store catalogs. A Files section contains general documents of the founding and operation of the museum from the Internet Archive, the Computer History Museum, Gordon Bell and Gwen Bell, and Gardner Hendrie. An illustrated timeline weaves the sections together to provide an overview.

The Computer Museum was governed by a Board of Directors, which appointed the executive director and various board committees to oversee operations and other areas such as collections, exhibits, education, and development. The following served as chairman of the board: Kenneth H. Olsen (1982–1984), John William Poduska, Sr. (1984–1988), Gardner C. Hendrie (1988–1993), Charles A. Zraket (1993–1997), and Lawrence Weber (1997–2000).

The museum's collections were jump started with the collections of Gordon and Gwen Bell, who had been actively collecting since the 1970s. To bring structure and discipline to collecting efforts, an acquisitions policy was developed in which computing materials were classified into Processor, Memory, and Switch categories, known as the PMS classification. The Transducer category was also added to cover input/output devices. The museum actively collected artifacts throughout its history, though acquisition criteria became more selective over time owing to increasingly adherence to collecting criteria and severely limited storage space. Acquired artifacts ranged in size from a single chip to the multiple components of a single mainframe computer. In addition to artifacts, the museum collected images, film, and video. Noteworthy early acquisitions included parts of Whirlwind 1, UNIVAC 1, the TX 0, a CPU from the Burroughs ILLIAC IV, IBM 7030 "Stretch", NASA Apollo Guidance Computer Prototype, a CDC 6600, a CRAY 1, PDP 1, PDP 8, EDSAC Storage Tube, Colossus pulley, and components of the Ferranti Atlas, and the Manchester Mark I. In June 1984, the collection of artifacts and films numbered 900 cataloged items. Examples of acquisitions of computers in the preceding year included an Apple 1, Burroughs B 500, Digital Equipment Corp. PDP 1, Franklin Ace 100, and IBM SAGE: AN/FSQ 7 components. Several types of memory were acquired, including core memory, plasma cell memory, rope memory, selectron tube, magnetic cards, mercury delay line, and fixed head drum. Between Fall 1995 and Spring 1996, The museum sponsored the Early Model Personal Computer Contest. A call for the earliest personal computers netted 137 additions to the collections. The judges, Steve Wozniak, David Bunnell, and Oliver Strimpel awarded prizes for the earliest machines to John V. Blankenbaker for the Kenbak 1 (1972), Robert Pond for the Altair 8800, Lee Felsenstein for the prototype VDM 1, Don Lancaster for the prototype TVT 1, and Thi T. Truong for the Micral. In 1986–7, the museum acquired 27 computers, including a CDC 1604, MIT AI Lab CADR, MIT Lincoln Lab LINC, Prime Computer Model 300, Research Machines 380Z, and a Xerox Alto II. As part of the development of the Smart Machines gallery, robot collecting was especially active, with robots such as Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Institute's Direct Drive Arm I and Pluto Rover, GM Consight I Project materials, Johns Hopkins University Adaptive Machines Group's Beast, Naval Systems International Sea Rover, and Rehabilitation Institute of Pittsburgh Page Turning Robot. The collections of Subassemblies and Components, Memories, Calculating Devices and Transducers continued to expand as well. Spurred by the difficulty of preserving a fast evolving technology built by future oriented engineers and entrepreneurs, the museum signed a joint collecting agreement with the Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of American History to collectively ensure that important computing artifacts would be preserved. Under this 1987 agreement, a common catalog and database of both museums' collections would be created. Digital image processing The gallery included the history, technology and applications of digital image processing. Possibly the first ever digital image was acquired from Jet Propulsion Labs, consisting of hand assembled colored strips of line printer output from the Mariner 4 Mars probe (1965).

A permanent gallery devoted to the history and technology of artificial intelligence and robotics opened in 1987. Knowledge based systems Interactive exhibits focused on expert systems. Examples included a medical diagnosis system, a simple rule based simulated bargaining store keeper with whom visitors haggled over the price of a crate of strawberries, a computer composition system, and a system that plays tic tac toe according to a visitor selected strategy. Robot sensing Museum visitors could interact with four robot sensing modalities: vision, hearing, touch, and sonar. Vision: after arranging a set of simple shapes on a board, a vision system attempted to recognize them using edge detection. Hearing: this was exemplified by a speech recognition system. Touch: visitors touch a pressure sensitive pad that outputs the distribution of pressure under their figures onto a display. Sonar: a ceiling mounted sensor measured a visitor's height by bouncing a signal off the top of the head. the quadruped Titan III from the Tokyo Institute of Technology, and a Denning Mobile Robot; robot arms included Unimate I, the Rancho and Stanford Arms and Orm from Stanford, the Direct Drive Arm 1 from Carnegie Mellon University, and the Tentacle Arm from MIT. Richard Fowler was recruited from The Science Museum, London/Bradford, as exhibit designer. The exhibit garnered international publicity and more than doubled visitor traffic to the museum.

Through a series of nine milestones portrayed with vignettes and interactive exhibits, this permanent exhibit portrayed computing from the punched card machines of the 1930s through the ubiquitous embedded microprocessors of the 1990s. The birth of electronic computer milestone featured a piece of the 1951 Whirlwind I computer with an interactive exhibit explaining core memory. Machines for big business were exemplified by a UNIVAC I installation and an IBM System 360. The emergence of computer programming languages was featured in a milestone showing how for the first time, different computers were programmed to accept a common language COBOL. A 1970s vignette portrayed a PDP 8 minicomputer being used backstage to control theater lighting, and applications to scientific computer were shown with a CRAY 1 at the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasts. A student publishing her school newspaper using a Macintosh showed the beginning of personal computing.

The exhibition demonstrated eight application areas using some 40 computer stations. The first area, "Making Pictures" featured a Virtual Reality Chair among other interactive stations focusing on graphics. The other areas addressed writing, making sound, calculating, playing games, exploring information, and sharing ideas.

Against a backdrop of the explosive growth of the Internet, this 4,000 square foot exhibit addressed the history, technology, and applications of the growing computer network infrastructure. Exhibits included an interactive live air traffic control display, a real time view into stock exchange transactions, and several internet stations (not commonly found in public spaces at that time) with constantly changing selections of sample web sites to reveal the diversity of Internet applications.

In collaboration with the MIT Media Lab, The Computer Museum launched The Computer Clubhouse in 1993 to provide children from under served inner city communities access to computers to learn how to use and program computers. Guided by adult mentors, children engaged in projects such as developing simulations, building and programming robots, and creating computer games. Spurred by a major grant from Intel Corp., a national and then international network of computer clubhouses was established. After the museum closed in 1999, the Clubhouse moved to the Museum of Science, Boston, which also served as the headquarters of The Computer Clubhouse Network. partial Turing tests, World Micromouse Contest, Core War contests, Computer Animation Festival, and the 25th Anniversary of Computer Games.