THE Computer History Museumbased in Mountain View, California, seems like a good way to spend an afternoon for anyone interested in the history of computers. And if that description sounds good to you but you’re not in California, then rejoice, because CHM recently launched OpenCHMan excellent online portal designed to enable exploration of the museum remotely.
You can of course just click to see what catches your eye, but if that seems too unclear you can also jump straight to the collection. strong points. As you would expect, these include a solid selection of early computers and microcomputers, as well as photos, recordings, and other period items. historical import. Several objects predate the information age, including one Jacquard loom and a copy of The Adams Cable Codexa fascinating book from 1894 that lists hundreds of code words used to save space when sending messages over cable. Fortunately, there is a complete analysis of the same book on the Internet Archive, as CHM’s documentation on the latter is rather minimal.
This is the case across the entire site. In fairness, OpenCHM is still in beta and we hope that the object descriptions will be fleshed out as the site develops. But as it stands, their concise nature means that some of the objects on display are unfortunately inscrutable. For example, it took a bit of Googling to figure out what a klystron it does, and the CHM description isn’t much help, noting only that “This item is mounted on a wooden base.” (For the record, a klystron is a vacuum tube amplifier that looks cool as hell.)
Still, these quibbles aside, there’s a wealth of material to explore here, and overall, Open CHM makes this both easy and enjoyable. It offers several entry points to the collection. In addition to the aforementioned highlights page and a series of curated collectionsthere is something called the “discovery wall”. This is described as “a dynamic showcase of artifacts chosen by visitors online”, and it’s certainly interesting to see what catches people’s attention. At the time of our virtual tour, items on display on the Discovery Wall included an alarming yellow Atari t-shirt from 1977, a Tamagotchi (in its original packaging!), a closet of the 2023 Writers’ Guild strike (“Don’t let robots write your shows!”) and a Microsoft PS/2 Mousethe mere sight of which is likely to make anyone who remembers turning one of them over to remove the trackball and clean months of accumulated crud of the two small rollers inside.
However, perhaps the most poignant element we encountered was a copy from Ted Nelson’s 1974 self-published opus Computer liberation/Dream machineswho promoted computer literacy and the liberation Nelson hoped it would bring. THE document is surprisingly forward-thinking – among other things, he predicted hypertext, of which Nelson was a first promoter– but the techno-utopianism on display today seems both delightfully innocent and painfully naive. “New Freedoms Through Computer Screens,” the back cover promises. If only they knew.
