Classic Chat: Preserving Computer History
upstart writes:
Classic Chat: Preserving Computer History:
Among the many facets of modern technology, few have evolved faster or more radically than the computer. In less than a century its very nature has changed significantly: today's smartphones easily outperform desktop computers of the past, machines which themselves were thousands of times more powerful than the room-sized behemoths that ushered in the age of digital computing. The technology has developed so rapidly that an individual who's now making their living developing iPhone applications could very well have started their career working with stacks of punch cards.
With things moving so quickly, it can be difficult to determine what's worth holding onto from a historical perspective. Will last year's Chromebook one day be a museum piece? What about those old Lotus 1-2-3 floppies you've got in the garage? Deciding what artifacts are worth preserving in such a fast moving field is just one of the challenges faced by Dag Spicer, the Senior Curator at the Computer History Museum (CHM) in Mountain View, California. Dag stopped by [...] to talk about the role of the CHM and other institutions like it in storing and protecting computing history for future generations.
[...] In addition to the hardware itself, the CHM also maintains a collection of ephemera that serves to capture some of the institutional memory of the era. Notebooks from the R&D labs of Fairchild Semiconductor, or handwritten documents from Intel luminary Andrew Grove bring a human touch to a collection of big iron and beige boxes.
[...] Quoting the the words of early Digital Equipment Corporation engineer Gordon Bell, Dag says these computers are "beautiful sculptures" that "reflect the times of their creation" in a way that can't easily be replicated. They represent not just the technological state-of-the-art but also the cultural milieu in which they were developed, with each and every design decision taking into account a wide array of variables ranging from contemporary aesthetics to material availability.
Some, in the Hackaday comments to this story, said "Why people obsess over keeping technology from the past I will never understand. It's old, its useless, just pitch it and lets move on. Keeping crap like this is like trying to preserve a fart. Its useless & pointless." Personally I disagree with this view, but what do you think of the idea of preserving items of technology as historical reminders of what once was? What items would you suggest should be kept?
Read more of this story at SoylentNews.