Why the Real Thing Is Essential for Telling Our Stories - History of Computing: Learning from the Past - page 13

Why the Real Thing Is Essential for Telling Our Stories
David Demant
Senior Curator Information and Communication,
Museum Victoria, GPO Box 666, Melbourne, Victoria 3001, Australia
[e-mail]
Abstract. Museum Victoria possesses the only intact first generation electronic
stored program computer left in the world. Real things, like CSIRAC, are entry
portals to a past era. Along with contemporary documents and records, they are
the closest we can get to time travel. They complement historical records.
Historical records are not substitutes for the real thing, neither are replicas or
facsimiles. We use real objects in combination with historical and contemporary
knowledge to develop our understanding of the past. The presentation answers
the question implied by the title 'Why the real thing is essential for telling our
stories'' in two ways. First, it discusses what we and future generations gain by
conserving and interpreting the real thing on an on-going basis. Second, it
gives examples from the museological work done with CSIRAC and its archive.
Keywords: first-generation; stored-program; electronic; computer; software;
CSIRAC; objects; real-thing; facsimiles; replicas; museum; archive.
1 Museum Victoria
Museum Victoria possesses the only intact first generation electronic stored program
computer left in the world.
It is a real thing, not a replica. It was the first computer in Australia, fourth in the
world. It is complemented by a complete archive of software, documentation, paper-
work and drawings - also all real things.
Real things are Rosetta stones - entry portals to a past era. Along with contempo-
rary documents and records, they are the closest we can get to time travel. They com-
plement historical records; they are not substitutes.
What do real things like CSIRAC and its archive share with the Rosetta Stone? The
Rosetta Stone enabled us to recover information coded in Egyptian hieroglyphs. This
knowledge had been lost for over 1300 years. The Stone has inscribed upon it a single
text written in three different inscriptions, one of which is hieroglyphics. The repre-
sentation of this text in three scripts, combined with contemporary understandings and
knowledge, enabled scholars to decipher the hieroglyphs. The story of the Rosetta
Stone gives us hope that 'lost' information can be recovered.
For the purposes of this paper, the story of Rosetta Stone has another important
lesson. The analysis of the Stone led to the discovery that the hieroglyphic language is
more than a pictorial representation of ideas; that it is a spoken language with more
information embedded in it than just images. The analysis revealed more of the