The computer exhibition at the Science Museum By Sebastian Werner As we travelled to the famous and fantastic Science Museum in the heart of London, our advanced-level maths class visited the computer department. This part of the museum traces the fast development of calculators and computers. As we saw, today’s computers are not as huge and enormous as in former times. Machines which filled one who le room in the 19th century could achieve less than today’s pocket calculators. We started our tour of inspection at the most attractive display item of the exhibition – it was a reproduction of the famous first mechanical computer called «DIFFERENCE ENGINE”, built originally by Charles Babbage in 1831. It was the first machine which allowed the user more than the four fundamental operations of arithmetic. From this point on, our tour offered us a variety of the beginning of logical signs and ideas, which all show us how logical mathematics is and that there is often more than one way to solve our numeric problems. It’s all the same if you use huge and complicated machines or only tiny rulers – you always come more or less easily to the same exact result. But these machines cannot only solve «easy” mathematical problems like addition or subtraction, as many people might think. Multiplication, division and even exponential functions with high figures can also easily be solved by these old calculating machines. Our expedition further led us to the sort of computers which remind us of those computers we are used to these days – the first electronic computers, which could only be built after some important inventions like the transistor had been realized. Later we saw another interesting showpiece – a hard drive dated 1984. Anybody who knows how much GB of data can nowadays be stored in tiny hard-disks located in notebooks will be surprised and astonished at the sight of the huge hard-disk which has the size of a dice, the base of which is made of four beer-crates and the height of which is comparable to two crates, one put on top of the other. In spite of these dimensions the 1984 hard-disk drive could only store about 10 MB of data. Evaluating the whole computer exhibition, I think that it does not fully meet the expectations of the interested computer user of our time, because the exhibits are rather old. But this should not be seen too critically, because due to the fast development of micro-electronics nowadays it would be too expensive and a lot of work expenditure for the museum to keep the exhibition up to date. Another reason for showing all this »old« technology is that the museum does not want to present all these new gadgets but rather the old original inventions which show the visitors how our ancestors coped with mathematics.

Zurück zur London-Inhaltsübersicht

Zurück zur Homepage-Zugangsseite