Computing museum delves into tech past

Historian and curator Doron Swade asks critical questions regarding the evolution - or revolution - of the computer era, writes Karlin Lillington

Computer historian Doron Swade has stepped into what many computing fans would consider a dream job - creating the centrepiece exhibit for the Silicon Valley's Computer History Museum, a timeline project to be opened in October 2009.

Unlike most museums, this curator has direct access to many of the key players on the timeline, some living within a few miles of the museum itself.

Is that intimidating? "They're knowledgeable, they're confident, and they're on the exhibit board," quips the former curator at London's Science Museum. "You're writing the history of gravity with Newton on the board."

It's true: the lengthy roster of board members is a checklist of some of the greatest names of the computing era: C Gordon Bell, Federico Faggin, Gene Amdahl, among others.

The further back in time the exhibit, the less controversial it will be, he says. "Whereas writing about now, you're talking about people shouting over the table about what happened. So there's a fascinating question of what constitutes a narrative. Was the computer era a revolution? Was it discovered or invented? It's a huge question and hard to answer. When you're close to the Big Bang, it looks very slow."

Many of the era's pioneers, still living in the Silicon Valley region, don't think we have seen a computing "revolution", but an evolution - not least because they do not see their own roles as particularly dramatic or significant.

"Most of them are so self-effacing! Most of them cannot believe we talk about a revolution - to them it was a massive incrementalism," he says.

"We know now that the Soviets, separated from what was happening in the US and Europe, developed a very different internal architecture for their computers. That suggests there aren't laws to be discovered, but a future to be invented."

Swade, a South African who is an electrical engineer himself, first linked up with the Computer History Museum in 1999, when he talked to chairman Len Shustek about working there. But other activities intervened - finishing a PhD on 19th century calculating engines - until the guest curatorship emerged.

"I always felt there was some destiny involved with this place," he says. For now, he alternates several weeks in London with several weeks in the San Francisco Bay Area, but will be based in the history museum for a nine-month stretch next year when the project really gets underway.

He finds the cultural differences between the US and Britain fascinating, not least the different way in which a curator versus an engineer is viewed. "In the UK, one is a gentleman philosopher of the leisured classes, and one is tainted by trade," he says. "In the US, the standing is reversed: engineers are God, and curators are unpaid! The cultural climate is very different."

As a curator, he describes himself as "basically self taught. I started reading the books on my shelves and in the Bodleian [ Library at Oxford]. That's how I first learned about Babbage."

Charles Babbage was the 19th century inventor of a computer that was never built - his "Difference Engine" - and Swade wrote some of the books that helped introduce this father of computing to a wider audience.

By coincidence, when he was a curator at the London Science Museum he ended up overseeing the project to build the first functioning Difference Engine, to Babbage's plans ("No one knew if they worked," Swade says, but it did). The device remains one of the museum's most prized exhibits.

So, how will he proceed with the timeline? He thinks in terms of two audiences for the timeline - what he calls "the usual suspects", the computing aficionados who already know quite a bit about computing; and the general public, who probably don't. He needs to satisfy both, but keep it simple. As for perspective, he says there are two general views that could be taken: that technology itself is the driver of history, or the reverse, that the context of history makes the machines. He favours a middle ground, where both elements are key to what he sees as "the crucible of innovation".

"That's what is one of the very interesting things about doing the timeline here - it's telling a story. So there's a need to find the balance between contextual narrative and the drivers of history, technology and people."

And what is it like for him, to be able to talk to the people who are the drivers of his timeline's history? "It's an unbelievable privilege to have access to these guys . . . People here take for granted that these people are walking around and their legendary stature," he says. "The gods upon which the parables of the modern age are founded."