2000 Years of Computing History, at a Museum in California

30 January 2011

Computer History Museum senior curator Dag Spicer looks at a replica of the first transistor at the museum in Mountain View, California

This is the VOA Special English Technology Report.

Silicon Valley in Northern California is home to many of the world’s largest technology companies. These include Apple, Google, Oracle, Intel, Cisco Systems and Hewlett-Packard.

The valley is also home to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. It reopened last month after nineteen million dollars worth of improvements. The project took nearly two years.

One of the additions is a permanent exhibit called "Revolution: The First 2000 Years of Computing."

Alex Bochannek is a curator at the museum. Mr. Bochannek says the new exhibit tells the story of more than one thousand historical objects.

ALEX BOCHANNEK: "Some of the oldest items are actually not computers. They are devices that helped people calculate. And the first object people see walking into the exhibit is an abacus from the eighteen hundreds. Because the abacus is a daily-use device made from wood, few of them have survived.”

Mr. Bochannek says people have the chance to handle some of the objects in the exhibit. He says one of the more popular items is a portable computer from nineteen eighty-one.

ALEX BOCHANNEK: “We think of portable computers today as laptops. But the Osborne One was about the size of a sewing machine and weighed twenty-four pounds. So, just being able to pick one of those up will help our visitors understand how difficult portability was about thirty years ago.”