Computer History Lecture Series
"Collecting and Conserving Computers"

 

Doron Swade
Senior Curator of Computing
Science Museum, London, U.K.

Thursday, March 4, 5:30 p.m.
Building 40, Silicon Graphics, Inc., Mountain View, CA.

Doron Swade beside Babbage's Calculating Engine

at the Science Museum, London.

Engineers take pride in fixing things, conservators in preserving them. There is a direct conflict between restoration, which often involves physical intervention, and conservation, which subscribes to the notion that the object is an inviolate part of historical evidence and should not be modified. This presentation explores the practical and ethical implications of actively preserving computers through restoration, reconstruction, physical replication and logical simulation. Examples are drawn from the major programmes recently undertaken in England, including the Manchester `Baby', the Bletchley Park Colossus, the Ferranti Pegasus, the Elliott 803, Babbage's Engine, and the Phillips Economics Computer, a hydro-mechanical analog machine from the late 1940s.

 

The philosophical and practical implications of collecting and conserving software, an equally challenging problem, will also be discussed.

Biographical Note:

Doron Swade is the Senior Curator for Computing and Information Technology at the Science Museum in London. He is an electronics engineer and an historian of computing. He has published widely on the history of computing and on curatorship, and written three books, two on Charles Babbage and one, co-authored, on the Information Age. His fourth book, The Cogwheel Brain, is due out in October this year. Swade masterminded the construction of Babbage's Difference Engine No. 2, which was completed at the Science Museum on the bicentenary of Babbage's birth in 1991. Swade's book The Dream Machine, was the companion text to the BBC/PBS-series The Machine That Changed The World, information available here.
Additional writings by Swade include The Digital Superhighway and the Curator, and The Problems of Software Conservation.