Wednesday 1st July 2009, Swindon, United Kingdom – Today from 5:15pm, Gordon Graylish who is Intel’s Vice President of Europe Middle East and Africa will be onsite and at 5:45pm he will cut the ribbon heralding the opening of the new venue for the UK’s first dedicated Museum of Computing, originally set up in 2002. From 6pm onwards, around 200 VIPs, local Councillors and IT companies from around Swindon are gathering to review the new location and see some showcase items from the Museum’s large collection.
Technology has changed beyond recognition in one lifetime and the museum holds over 3,000 pieces of hardware, 2000 software items and about 2,000 computer periodicals and manuals. The Museum of Computing’s objective is to document innovations of the past as well as look to the future of Information Technology. It will track seventy years of men of vision, brilliant engineers & software architects who shaped the way we live, work & communicate today. At any one time, around 5 to 10% of the collection will be on display.
The revolution that saw computers the size of three rooms move from air conditioned labs onto the desktop, into your pocket and onto the world-wide web, has been driven by miniaturisation and the rapid evolution of computer processors and the microchip. Gordon Moore – co-founder of Intel (which has its European headquarters in Swindon) famously said in an article decades ago ‘The number of transistors on a chip will double every 24 months.’ This principle was surprisingly accurate and has become known as ‘Moore’s Law’.
Intel are proud sponsors of the museum along with IT PR firm Blue Click PR and Clark Holt, local solicitors specialising in IT law. Gordon Graylish says ‘Intel has an interest in educating the next generation of IT Programmers, engineers and systems architects. We have plenty of museums in the UK covering the industrial revolution of the 19th Century but the Museum of Computing’s depth and breadth lays a rock solid foundation of history of the digital revolution. The IT industry has made astonishing progress over the last 30 years and it’s important for that knowledge to be conserved.
Intel fully supports their work because Intel is inside about 70% to 80% of the collection! We’re right at the heart of IT and are writing tomorrow’s history today!’
When open to the public in late July/August, visitors will see a selection of parts of mainframes, personal computers, portables, laptops, handhelds, gaming consoles, calculators and more. You will be introduced to a world of wafers, valves, LED’s, diodes, transistors, magnetic tapes, floppy discs, processors and microchips – which all delivered instant push-button gratification in their day!
One unusual fact about computers is that The United States of America’s NASA space programme put men on the moon in 1969 with a computer with only 70K hard wire storage (ROM) and 4K of RAM. NASA’s back-up computer was a slide rule! An average desktop PC now has a million times that power. To find out more, we welcome visitors and also volunteers to help preserve these great achievements of our lifetime. We also welcome the participation of IT companies that wish to contribute their knowledge, company history and products (past, present and future) to future exhibitions.
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Museum of Computing Profile
The museum is devoted solely to the history of the development of computers. It is located between Swindon’s new Central Library and the Wyvern Theatre, in the Town Centre. This initiative is being supported by the Science Museum in Wroughton, the British Computer Society and Swindon Borough Council. The Museum has a growing collection of exhibits and accepts donations of suitable machines. Its function will be to act as a showcase for outside exhibitors. The first exhibition was presented by Bletchley Park Trust. The Museum is keen to show former products of commercial computer companies, and welcomes such offers. www.museumofcomputing.org.uk
For further details, jpegs, screen grabs or interviews contact
Rhona Jack MIPR
Blue Click PR Ltd.
Tel: +44 (0) 1793 635147
Mobile: +44 (0)7866 546221
rhona@blueclickpr.com
For details on specific computer exhibits, contact
Simon Webb
Mobile +44 (0)7834 375628
info@museumofcomputing.org.uk
TECHNICAL DETAILS OF MAIN EXHIBITS TODAY
For the launch party, we will showcase a selection of objects from the collection as follows:-
1. Control panel from a 1950 University of London Atlas computer found in a shed near Wroughton, being used to control a model railway.
2. Felt & Tarrant Comptometer 1910 – a mechanical calculator from a bygone age. Leader of Swindon Council Rod Bluh cut his teeth on this hand-cranked device.
3. Commodore PET 1977 – one of the first all-in one-plug and play computers
4. BBC Micro 1981 - hugely successful in schools and found in a local school still in use in 2004
5. Sinclair ZX81 with 1K internal RAM – introduced a lot of people to programming. 1 million sold. In 1981 it cost £79 which was considered low-cost. To save a further £20 people used to build them from a kit.
6. Atari 2600 games console 1979 – one of the first games consoles with plug in cartridges. Sales rocketed when the Space Invaders game was launched
7. POQUET PC – early pocket PC notable for its scrabble tile style keyboard
8. Apple Macintosh Classic – celebrating 25 years as a design icon. First ever computer to introduce the ‘mouse’ as a method of operating its Graphical User Interface (GUI). Compared to Microsoft’s DOS, this was very user-friendly. Microsoft later introduced Windows, based on Apple’s great success.
9. Apple IMAC – Quite simply a design icon
10. Teletype ASR 44 – first used to programme a computer before keyboards & screens
11. Nintendo Gameboy – Handheld games device made popular in the early 1990’s.
12. Osborne 1 – launched in 1981 as one of the first ‘Portables’ with a 5“ computer screen, it was more aptly nick-named a ‘luggable’ due to its bulky size and weight of around 15kg.
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