R-Evolution

This will be my final post from this trip to the US, and it may be the most exciting for me. We took a trip to a very special museum today - one called R-Evolution, which records the first 2000 years of computing. It's located not far from the centre of Mountain View in the centre of Silicon Valley, and is truly excellent with lots of videos to watch, A-V explanation of mathematics and computing, and plenty of hands-on opportunities. For example, Emily and I played PONG, a game bearing the same name as the child in her womb! This is, of course, a nickname.

It took us 4 hours to go around the extensive exhibits and staff were at hand to explain things. Being Silicon Valley, the museum was also crowded. Exhibits included the Antikythera, a 2000 year old astronomical device designed by the Greeks to forecast eclipses and the dates of Olympic games. It could do the former accurately for 250 centuries ahead, no mean feat.

Then came some other extraordinary feats like Napier's bones and Babbage's computer, dating from 17th and 19th centuries respectively. Indeed, much of the early part of the exhibition recorded the slow 20th century evolution of computer hardware ... all the way up to the famous Cray of the 1970s, then the world's most powerful machine.

Thereafter, the exhibits covered every aspect of computing: the evolution of hard-drives, chip design, mother-boards, programming languages, devices like a kitchen computer for giving cooking instructions, robotics, the development of desk-tops, laptops, and net-books - all of which begin to converge with the mobile phone, use of computers for creative art and music, and the emergence of the Internet.

For me, the exhibits were a trip down memory lane. I programmed an English Electric KDF9 in the 1960s using the Algol language punched into paper tape. In retrospect, I deserve some sort of medal for getting the Double Poisson and Negative Binomial probability distributions up and running on what are now viewed as crude machines. It took an eternity with only one run a day, not real-time development as now. It also reminded me that I took part in the early stages of modern computing - in a user sense. I saw one of the first demonstrations of the Internet back in the 1980s, long before most people had heard of the idea.

I strongly urge my readers to give this museum a visit when you're next out this way and come to terms with the greatest drive of modernity. It truly documents a R-Evolution.

AS