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The Material of the Digital

The Material of the Digital talk that I gave at the Oxford Internet Institute is now up on their webcast. The talk looks at the development of the new computing gallery at the Science Museum and the need to display the material culture of computing alongside the ephemeral world of software and applications. If you have any thoughts of displays of computing culture in museums and galleries you can add them to the comments part of Bill Dutton's blog.

BBC Micro computer event at the Science Museum

On January 11^th 1982, the BBC launched its Computer Literacy Project. This involved television programmes seen by millions, an array of books and courses which sold in many thousands, a national advice service supported by the Department of Trade and Industry, and – perhaps the most innovative and remarkable element – The BBC Microcomputer, designed and produced by Acorn Computers.

To celebrate the "Legacy of the BBC Micro" over 25 years on the Computer Conservation Society are holding an event on 20^th March 2008, 14.30 to 17.00, in the Fellows Room at the Science Museum. More information is available from the CCS website: http://www.computerconservationsociety.org/20080320.htm

Woz at the Science Museum

Steve Wozniak was at the Science Museum today for the launch of GameOn history of computer games exhibition. You can hear his trip down computer nostalgia lane from the BBC here.

This guy rocks

The Dancing Demon was written in 1979 by Leo Christopherson for the Radio Shack TRS80 Model I computer.

ContentLab 2005

PACT's ContentLab 2005 starts tomorrow in Birmingham and if last year is anything to go by it should be a fun event. With a keynote by Hilary Cottam from the Design Museum and sessions on online learning and Ofcom's 'big idea', the Public Service Publisher, it should be set to raise an interesting agenda about the future of interactive content. The most lively session looks likely to be  iRoom 101, where Peter Cowley from Endemol will be placing his most hated interactive content. This will be inspired by my own exhibition on the walls of the conference, looking at 'A Decade of British Interactive Content'. Watch this space for updates.

Digital Preservation

Anyone who missed the Digital Curation Centre conference last month, or felt it was a bit too data focused, could do worse than head to the Digital Preservation and Heritage Colloquium at Abertay Dundee in November. The sessions will be looking at the application of digital technologies to the long-term preservation of cultural and heritage resources. I'm hoping to raise issues around the preservation of computer software, but also look at one example of how the Science Museum has created a digital resource around its material culture which is more than just the digitisation of objects online. So if you are headed for Scotland in November I look forward to seeing / meeting you there.

Computer History in the New Scientist

The New Scientist ran an article this week about the new enthusiasm for digital history and our work at the Science Museum on computer conservation and digital preservation. The journalist Will Knight came on one of my magnificent tours of the computing collection stores and was so inspired that he took it upon himself to write a short piece on the history of computing. Shame he only quoted me as saying I was an eighties girl, and failed to attribute any of the great intellectual and historical insights I passed on to him!

Internet history

Yesterday I went to hear Katie Hafner from the NY Times talk at the LSE about the endless paternity debates for the Internet and the role of government funding in innovation. Her book written with her husband was a big influence on me when it came out in 1996, so I was interested to hear where she'd moved on to. It seems shes now interested in - among other things - Digital Preservation, but she still wants to get the facts of the Internet paternity debate right.

Hafner gave a very personal account of her interviews with the 'men of the net' such as J.C.R. Licklider (download his two most important papers here), Larry Roberts, Paul Barran, Donald Davies and Vint Cerf.  She then reitterated Len Kleinrock's hang-up that he doesn't get enough of the credit, but agreed wholeheartedly with Davies' analysis that it was a very liberal interpretation of Kleinrock's dissertation to say it was packet switching, given that it only looked at one node. I must admit I'd always assumed that Donald Davies' paper in 1967 at the ACM Symposium on Operating System Principles was one of the seminal works in the area, and the only true debate was between Davies and Barran. And as they had no problem acknowledging that they'd both tapped into the zeitgeist at the same time, then neither should we.

Later the debate moved on to whether the creation of the Internet is an enditment of capitalism (at this point you can seamlessly interchange 'Internet' with any number of recent inventions - personal computer, computer games..) Why is it that someone at every seminar on the history of technology feels the need to go there, oh these forces for good that could only possibly have come from our own entrepreneurial and democratic structures. What do people think they were doing in the USSR when they created Tetris?!