On Thu, Sep 26, 2002 at 02:21:28PM -0500, John Foust wrote:
>
> Anyone ever been to this place in Bozeman, MT?
>
> http://www.compuseum.org
Yes, in July after my brother's wedding (which was in Big Sky).
There's an impressive collection of artifacts -- a (the?) Cal-Tech prototype
electronic calculator, Gutenberg Bible, replica of the Antikythera
Mechanism, '60s IBM computers, Speak-And-Spell, combination calculator/
abacus, and much more. Apparently most of the collection is not on display.
Most museums' exhibits have individual themes and have no relationship
to each other. (i.e., you would have an office automation exhibit, a game
exhibit, a scientific computing exhibit, etc.) The Compuseum tries to tie
everything together in a single timeline. So the Gutenberg Bible is not
related to computing, but is related to the more fundamental issues of
communication and information storage, which have recently been
computerized. In the modern era the timeline splits up into themes anyway,
but I still liked the idea.
I had a hard time seeing some things (as usual) and the signs gave
almost no technical information (as usual). There's a video but I didn't
watch it. In short the presentation is not designed for the technical
audience. The owner was out so I wrote my questions down
for later.
Incidentally, the operation started after the owner's wife told him
the collection was too big... "Why don't you open a museum or something?"
At least that's the story I recall.
-- Derek
Received on Thu Sep 26 2002 - 15:01:00 BST