To the 8-year-old at The Computer Museum, discovering that the walk-through PC had been upgraded wasn't just a lesson in obsolescence, but in saying goodbye to what you love.
You know you're getting near The Computer Museum when you see the gigantic milk bottle. The two-story sculpture is actually a snack stand, but it's as good a signpost as any for the kind of wholesome yet slightly surreal experience that lies ahead. Museum Wharf is home to two of Boston's great museums: The Children's Museum and, more important for me, The Computer Museum, a converted woolens warehouse from the 19th century that now stores my memories.
I mean that. Whenever I go to Boston, I try to make a pilgrimage to the computers that have shaped my life - that have shaped all of our lives. They're all here: ancient pioneers like MIT's Whirlwind, whose banks of glowing vacuum tubes were once part of the prototype for a computer that tracked every plane flying over North America, or the MITS Altair, widely thought of as the world's first "personal" computer, and more. This is my Cooperstown.
Geeky? OK. But that's me - and, to a certain extent, it's my kids, too. That's why I thought it would be one of the all-time great outings for me and my computer-loving kids to run up to Boston for the day and take a tour of The Computer Museum. It was togetherness. It was fun. It seemed simple.
What I hadn't counted on though was the first rule of parenting (and, coincidentally, of computers): It's never simple.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. To understand the note my 8-year-old scrawled in my spiral-top reporter's notepad, to understand why she ended up crying atop a humongous keyboard, to understand why I would get so wrought up over passing on a love for silicon and digital logic to the next generation, you have to know something about the 14-year-old museum - and about us.
Me, I write for a living, mainly about science and technology and computers. These days I do it for The Washington Post. Five years back, I was doing it for Newsweek when I got a call from the museum. I knew a little bit about the place, of course, having read how Digital Equipment Corp. founder Ken Olsen and MITRE head Bob Everett had saved the Whirlwind as it was about to be carted off to scrap oblivion. To MIT it was junk; to Olsen it was history. He got together with other industry mavens and opened the showplace - not only to collect old machines, but to talk about them in human terms, as tools, toys, and companions. (There's even a computer made entirely of Tinkertoys and thread pieced together by Danny Hillis, founder of Thinking Machines Corp. It plays Tic Tac Toe.) The place naturally appeals to me, since it's the largest museum in the world devoted to explaining computers and the relationships we've formed with them. More than 135,000 visitors a year seem to agree.
That day five years ago, the museum folk invited me to take a look at their newest exhibit, "The Walk-Through Computer." It sounded like fun: create a Really Big Computer - say, two stories tall. Let people poke around in it. And, sneakily, teach them about how the parts of these things work together. Kinda like Land of the Giants, but with a message. It had potential. So I flew from New York to Boston. On a whim, I brought my daughter Elizabeth, who was then 3 years old.
When she saw the big box, she went nuts. She pushed the giant keys again and again and clambered onto the gargantuan trackball, watching it move the cursor on the moviehouse-dimensions screen. She ogled the table sized microprocessor - patterned after a 486 - and walked the lighted lines on the floor that represented the circuitry of the motherboard. And I knew: this was tooooo cool.
The story I put together didn't mention Elizabeth, but it tried to convey her excitement. "It boasts keys a foot across," I wrote, "6-foot-wide disks and - get ready for this oxymoron - the biggest microchip in the world. The exhibit actually teaches while it entertains," I concluded. "So the big computer will have done something that its pygmy brethren have so far found nearly impossible: making learning fun."
Now it's five years later, and I get another call from the museum staff. They're upgrading. After all, most of us want to get a better box after a few years, right? Their old clunker didn't even have a CD-ROM drive or a modem! That 486 was snazzy once, but now it's Pentium time. The old machine's 4 megabytes of RAM is pretty pathetic by today's standards: you can't even boot up today's operating systems without 8 megs, so why not shoot for 32? And like all of us, they needed a hard drive that packs a few gigabytes - big enough to handle the bloat of multimedia programs. The difference between them and us is that their upgrade cost about a million bucks, and took 60 people and 18 months to make happen.
I decide to take a look at the soul of the newer machine - and to bring Elizabeth back. In the years since the first visit, she has retained vivid memories, talked about it now and then, and asked when she could return.
We fly into Boston and take the water ferry downtown, walking over to the museum from the landing. This time, we also bring along Elizabeth's little brother, Sam, aka the Saminator. (He was born a month after the exhibit opened.) We see the big milk bottle as we approach the red-brick building, and then we take the glass-walled elevator to the sixth floor; this is where all the exhibits start. From the elevator, visitors get a gorgeous view of the city's downtown skyscrapers - but when they turn around to get off, they head toward something just as impressive: It.
You approach "The Walk-Through Computer 2000" from above, looking down at the 12-foot-high color monitor from the stairway landing. You almost walk into the screen as you descend the stairs. People below working the trackball make images appear and bounce around on screen - all 108 square feet of it. VR jocks, eat your hearts out.
We round the stairs and continue our descent; the 20-foot-long keyboard, minivan-sized trackball, and CD-ROM drive come into view, arrayed on a carpet that makes the whole scene look like a vast gray metal desktop. An industry-regulation beige case cleverly encloses the rest of the exhibit.
For the moment, we skip the peripherals and rush straight inside the box. A chronic computer-envy kind of guy, I have to see what's under the hood. The new box doesn't disappoint. They rethought the whole design, finding new ways to explain computing (while embedding the logos of corporate sponsors everywhere) and adding the kinds of peripherals no self respecting disc jockey could do without. Now visitors can flip magnets on the 4.2-gig (Quantum) hard drive to "write" the data; the (3Com) Ethernet card includes a funky animated cartoon about how computers recognize their messages; the (Philips Electronics) CD-ROM player actually shoots a laser at pits on the surface of a gigantic mirrored disc.
The exhibit is loaded with educational bells and whistles. The (Intel Pentium) microprocessor includes a dizzying chip-flyover video. Pushing buttons nearby causes the megachip to execute its instructions, and the lights in the floor show the route electrons take to the various components necessary to complete a task. As in version 1.0, the mock machine's functions are executed by other, regular-sized computers.
By the time we leave the case to play on the keyboard, I decide this new exhibit is a success: bigger, slicker, and better than before. I'm getting a mild tech buzz. Then I see Elizabeth moping on the keyboard; tears are in her eyes. "Why can't it press down any more?" she asks plaintively.
Uh-Oh.
The original keyboard for the behemoth - actually, they could only fit about half a keyboard into the space - included a few keys users could push to send signals to the CPU. This new keyboard, though, was designed to address an old problem: kids wanted to jump on the previous machine, but museum officials felt it was too dangerous for such monkeyshine. ("Those keys were steep," says the museum spokesperson Gail Jennes.) The new one is a low-profile ergonomic design with jumpability built in. It's more complete and more fun, but lacks the satisfying ker-thunK! of actually pushing a button.
And nothing else matters to Elizabeth. "The keyboard stinks!" she says, bitterly.
Her little brother, unencumbered by the baggage of memory, is having a dangerously wonderful time. Sam plays a Breakout-like arcade game onscreen. He capers on the keys, starting at Enter, shooting at a dead run to Caps Lock, and launching himself off the keyboard into a crashing encounter with the industrial carpet beyond. (Risking serious bodily injury always entertains him.) A budding master of the obvious, he explains that this computer is just like the one he plays with at home with one exception - "ours isn't huge like this."
As we talk later with Christopher Grotke, the new exhibit's designer, Elizabeth quietly spills her critique. Grotke, a veteran museum exhibit designer who helped create a stunning tribute to animator Chuck Jones at the Washington, DC, Capital Children's Museum, looks as if this little kid has wounded him. After all, he lives to see them light up. Grotke tells us to go to lunch and come back in a while.
As we eat, Elizabeth and Sam carp at each other. Elizabeth, by now totally inconsolable, nearly bursts into tears again - this time, over getting a toy with her Happy Meal that she already owned.
But when we get back to Grotke's cubicle, he has a surprise for Elizabeth: a key from the original machine. The L. He had previously put them aside, thinking he might sell them off individually in the museum's annual auction on the Web, but never actually did anything with them. As we get ready to leave the office, Elizabeth stops by a whiteboard and grabs a marker. First she draws two boxes. Then she draws boxes within the bottom box: slowly it dawns on the grown-ups that she is drawing a computer. She sketches a tiny figure on the keyboard, and under it writes: I love computers.
We melt, of course. Sam sees the excited reaction to this artwork and grabs the other marker, scrawling a spiky, blobby abstract. He proudly announces that he has drawn a turkey. It's time to go.
We lug the key back to Logan International Airport. Sam is asleep before our plane leaves the runway, but Elizabeth buries herself in a book, still pensive and more than a little sad. Suddenly the absurdity of it hits me: this 8-year-old is nostalgic, for Chrissake. And for a computer. Isn't this all happening a little fast? When I was her age, a computer cost millions, and the idea of calling one "personal" was ludicrous. Bill Gates was in elementary school. Kids who wanted to see pornographic images had to sneak a copy of Playboy out of Dad's closet.
Born in the year of the Sputnik launch, I believed I was growing up in the future; after all, my parents didn't even have television when they were kids. I could buy a transistor radio small enough to fit on the handlebars of my bike! Progress was my faith, and like so many parents I wanted my children to grow up in my church. But their lives are even more futuristic, more different from my childhood than mine was from my parents'. The things I find most astonishing seem mundane to these kids.
They probably spend about as much time in front of the computer as they do in front of the TV, and they have a natural feel for the machine. To them, it's just another one of the boxes in the house - like the microwave, the VCR, or the video camera - that perform the everyday magic they've come to expect. The computer is shaping their lives, too, but it's become ubiquitous; sometimes they scarcely seem to know it's there.
As we're winging our way back to Washington, Elizabeth asks for my notebook and writes: I feel sad about the computer. Jhon's dugter said on the plane. she started to cry. Then she felt a little better rembering the key. There was 1 thing that she wold never lose the memry.
Then she gives it back. Then she asks for it again and begins writing her own version of this story for me. She calls it "Saying Goodby to What You Love."
Then I understand. For her, flush with the intense emotions of childhood that I barely remember, this monumental PC is a part of her good-old days. To tell you the truth, The Computer Museum makes me pretty nostalgic, too. I gaze wistfully at the clunky teletype terminals I punched my first tape on in middle school, and at the key card machines I used in college. A version of the Apple II+ I bought in 1982 is there, and I can replay the incendiary cheesecake of the Macintosh "1984" commercial at the poke of a touchscreen.
We are both children of this computer revolution, Elizabeth and I; the main differences between us involve merely make and model. No matter - the machine warns us both of the same thing: obsolescence.
Even a child understands mortality.
