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Exhibit looks at the history of computers

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Programming language tree featuring at the computer history museum (Photo: Corey Takahashi)

In Mountain View, California a new exhibition is opening. It’s called Revolution: The First 2000 Years of Computing.

The exhibition, at the Computer History Museum, was more than six years in the making, a lifetime in computer years.

But unlike most technological enterprises it doesn’t look forward, but back.

This exhibition is on show in the heart of Silicon Valley, just down the road from Google’s worldwide headquarters. But according to exhibition launch director Paul Connolly the region is by no means the center of the computing world. Not if you take the long view.

The story of computing is “very much international,” says Connolly. He says it begins with Chinese abacuses all the way up to PCs, and even the web. France had an early version of the web, called the Minitel system, which has since been completely eclipsed by the web.

All of this is on display — the serious, the mathematical, and the whimsical. There’s an original Pong machine, from 1972, which is one of the earliest examples of a video game. There are archaic census machines, and Cold War-era defense and radar systems, complete with built-in ashtrays for the Air Force personnel who watched them.

There are plenty of obsolete items, like a Kookaburra laptop from an Australian company, or a Dragon 32, that may be the only computer ever mass-produced in Wales.

The Revolution exhibition is roughly chronological. As you step in deeper –beyond the hardware breakthroughs of World War II and the Cold War — the focus shifts to themes like artificial intelligence and data.

“People now tinker less with building hardware and more with building software,” says Alex Bochannek, one of the exhibition’s curators. “To build software, you need programming languages.”

Programming is something that to a lot of people who are not in the computing field is something of ”a black art, ” says Bochannek. It’s “somewhat magic.”

To demystify that magic, the exhibition has a family tree of programming languages that dates back to 1954.The chart features about 150 of the thousands of programming languages invented worldwide.

The languages’ names are far from familiar: Fortran, Lisp, Snobol, Algol, Simula, Basic, Pascal, Smalltalk.

But Bochannek says programming languages behave like regular spoken languages. They have “a syntax, a semantics,” and follow other conventions.

Programming languages are used in everything from automated banking to website building. This diversity of use is the reason so many exist.

Bochannek says it’s important to maintain that diversity. “There was an idea early on in programming languages that there’s going to be this one language that solves all problems,” he says. “And it’s similar in the spoken-language community, as well, with things like Esperanto and so forth. But oftentimes there are nuances you can not very easily express.”

Gio Wiederhold, started his own computer exhibition at Stanford University, where he is an emeritus professor. The Stanford museum shares some items with the Computer History Museum.

Wiederhold says it’s more difficult to capture computer history, than, say, art history. He says the true intellectual value of computing is represented less by artifacts than by ideas and ‘evolving code.’ As he puts it, an artifact “once it exists … is very hard to change.”

So what distinguishes ‘beautiful code’ that belongs in a museum from code that should just be tossed in the trash?

According to Wiederhold, “some ugly code works, so it won’t be tossed in the trash. But beautiful code is … just like beautiful text in writing, where somebody can read it. It is clear what is meant.”

As a young emigré programmer, Wiederhold wrote the code for combustion equations in the Polaris missile. He says that code was still in use as recently as a decade ago.

But, of course, the software has hugely increased in volume. Today there are millions of lines of code written just for say, an iPhone.

Wiederhold’s current research deals with the flow of intellectual property. He says the rapid flow has turned many programming languages into commodities, and it complicates old notions of software authorship.

He says all programming languages are converging. “We have many fewer languages than we used to have. So that’s a good thing.”

“It helps communication a great deal. When people were more narrow, they thought they needed different languages in their own country.”

“It means that I can send a program that’s written by a programmer here, at 6 p.m., to India, for somebody to help me in testing and de-bugging it.”

It’s a phenomenon called the 24-hour software factory.

Programming languages are completely universal, says Wiederhold. They’re no longer bound by countries.

Wiederhold hopes exhibitions like Revolution can help to explain these languages, so the next generation gets inspired to write new code. Perhaps, even beautiful, gallery-worthy code.