Virtual field trip to the Computer History Museum

Cloud Computing Virtual Trip

Cloud Computing Virtual Field Trip: Computer History Museum

Description of the Event

After having taken a virtual field trip to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA (http://www.computerhistory.org/) over the last week from home via the Internet, an appreciation of how interconnected and integrated the areas of mathematics, physics, electronics and the current state of computing and the Internet are today. The website is excellently designed to provide for drill-down on specific content areas and the history of technologies that support computing today, in addition to showing the unique aspects of software, the Internet and ground-breaking research by Google (Computer History Museum). The curators of the Computer History Museum have created excellent online materials for those who are taking a virtual field trip. The map to the right shows the entire museum including the specific locations of exhibits that are also provided online. After having looked at several museums online, this specific one was chosen for the virtual field trip.

Source: http://www.computerhistory.org/planvisit/

What Was Learned

The depth of research and continual investments in ARPA-Net, TCP/IP and the many protocols that support the Internet today illustrate how powerful the combination of federal and private investments are in driving innovation. In addition the role of minicomputer development, which first legitimized software for the mass market, was an inflexion point in the development of many related industries (Computer History Museum). Moore's Law and the many innovations are graphically illustrated, along with first-hand accounts of the engineering teams who produced the first memory chipsets and microprocessors (Computer History Museum). Their insights into how they envisioned their inventions helping mankind are prescient in their accuracy, as Dr. Gordon Moore in one online exhibit talks about enabling global communication with applications running on the fastest microprocessors (Computer History Museum).

In addition, the sections of the online exhibits about Apple Computer, Google and Netscape show how consumerization of it began over two decades ago and gathered momentum over time (Computer History Museum). These developments are what drove the continual evolution of operating systems to be more focused on the customer and less designed to just fulfill the goals and objectives of an engineer. The exhibits of Apple specifically show how the initial bursts of innovation the company had came from their unique approach to bootstrapping systems together out of economic necessity; they simply did not have the funds to pay for lots of inventory of parts. Apple's humble beginnings speak to the power of knowledge harnessed for innovation.