This proposed $6 billion technology park is modeled on Silicon Valley in Northern California.

Construction is slated to start this year. The plan is for the site to host Russian technology companies like Yandex, which is kind of a Russian version of Google as well as companies like Cisco and Nokia.

The Kremlin would like to see 15,000 scientists and entrepreneurs working there by 2015.

The site isn’t far from the Kremlin: just head down the Novy Arbat, cross the Moskva River and drive about 15 miles out of the city.

Can you name the Russian village that’s lending its land and its name to the technology project?

The answer is the Russian village of Skolkovo, just outside Moscow.

It’s where Russia’s engineers and designers envision a new Russian Silicon Valley, a technological business hub that might someday resemble northern California’s Silicon Valley. Anchor Marco Werman speaks with Chrystia Freeland who writes about this ambitious Russian technology initiative in this month’s Atlantic magazine.

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.

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MARCO WERMAN: Yesterday Hillary Clinton was in the Democratic Republic of Congo. She traveled east to a war zone to speak out against rampant sexual violence there. But she also focused on the causes of the conflict. That includes Congo’s lucrative minerals trade. Armed groups in the east fight to control the mines and then use the proceeds to fund their operations. The World’s Jeb Sharp reports.

JEB SHARP: Congo’s mineral wealth is legendary. Its mines supply some of the most valuable metals in the world including tungsten, tin, and coltan. And the United Nations as well as advocacy groups have long documented the way the trade in minerals there fuels the conflict in the eastern part of the country. Colin Thomas-Jensen is with the advocacy group Enough.

COLIN THOMAS JENSEN: The lack of state authority coupled with abundant natural wealth in Congo allows armed groups to control mines, to control taxation routes, and to make tons of money. And in the case of eastern Congo we estimate that armed groups make anywhere from $100 to $180 million last year from taxation and trade in illegal minerals.

SHARP: And Thomas-Jensen says there’s a good chance that some of those minerals are ending up in your cell phone.

THOMAS-JENSEN: Every time your cell phone vibrates the vibration is helped and caused by a little piece of tungsten. That’s what tungsten’s used for. Tin is used for solder to hold electronic parts together. And coltan, or tantalum, is a critical element in cell phone batteries.

SHARP: So when Hillary Clinton called on the international community yesterday to start looking at steps to try to prevent the mineral wealth of the DRC ending up in the hands of those who fund the violence advocacy groups were heartened. Amy Barry is with the group Global Witness in London.

AMY BARRY: Even before she arrived, Secretary Clinton’s choice of countries was important. We were struck by the fact that a number of countries that she visited were effected in one way or another by what’s known as the resource curse. So when did she did speak about the issue of minerals, mineral wealth in the DRC, as an underlying driver of the conflict, that was something that we do see a form of progress.

SHARP: Global Witness has been documenting the problem of so-called conflict minerals for a long time. The group put out a new report on Congo just last month. According to Barry the report showed that all the armed groups in eastern Congo, including the national army, are involved in the mines. And yet the issue is rarely discussed in coverage of the conflict she says.

AMY BARRY: Often the focus of press reports or political dialogue on the conflict in the DRC is around political differences between the groups of between the countries, Rwanda and the DRC for example, or ethnic divisions. In actual fact Global Witness has been saying for a long time that the underlying economic drivers, this vast natural resources wealth, is something that really must be addressed if the conflict is going to come to an end.

SHARP: As for those steps Clinton mentioned, Barry says companies buying, trading, and processing minerals as well as end users like computer and cell phone manufacturers should find out where their minerals are coming from. She says governments can take steps to make sure that happens as well as help the government of the DRC take back control of the industry inside its own borders. And of course consumers themselves can put pressure on both governments and companies. Again, Colin Thomas-Jensen of Enough.

THOMAS-JENSEN: The best way to put pressure on any industry is through consumers and I think what we’re starting to see, and it’s early yet, what we’re starting to see in the United States is a growing number of people who are aware of the situation in eastern Congo, appalled by it and who are learning about this connection between the trade and conflict minerals and consumer electronics. The minerals that are fueling this war are components, are critical elements of cell phones, laptops, mp3 players.

SHARP: What Thomas-Jensen doesn’t want is for companies to simply pull up stakes and take their trade elsewhere as some companies have already done. The idea isn’t to boycott minerals from eastern Congo, or have a moratorium on mining there; that only hurts the Congolese. What advocates do want is for companies to make sure any minerals they do buy aren’t passing through tainted hands, much as the diamond industry learned to avoid the so-called blood diamonds from West Africa that once fueled conflict there. For The World, I’m Jeb Sharp.

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