2011 Wilson & Stibitz Honorees, l. to r. Peter Belhumeur, John Kress, Edward O. Wilson, Federico Faggin and Jim Lotimer
Four years ago my son, a curator in the Ancient Greek and Roman Department of the Metropolitan Museum in New York, visited Bozeman for Thanksgiving. He asked me urgently if he could visit The American Computer Museum. "I must see the Antikythera Mechanism. It is the only chance I'll have to view it in the United States." Keremedjiev confirmed that he commissioned the replica of the world's earliest surviving computer from an orrery maker in London in 2002. None other is on public dis- play in the Western Hemisphere. However, the mangled remains of the original (from 80 B.C.) can be seen at the National Archaeological Museum in Athens. As we stood in front of the life-sized reproduction of the Gutenberg Press which Joannes Gensflaisch zur Laden Gutenberg assembled using a wine press design in Germa- ny in the mid-15th century, George observed that the in-
troduction of the iPad was as revolutionary in the field of communications in our own century as Gutenberg's press was in the 15th. Before 1455 there were thirty thousand books in Europe, mostly written by hand by scribes, each taking one year to complete. In 1499 there were twenty million books. It was a revolution equal to the one we enjoy with technology today. Recently, when I asked Maury Irvine how he would describe The American Computer Museum, he said, "No- where else can one find, under one roof, artifacts ranging from original 4500 year old Babylonian clay tablets to an original NASA Apollo Moon Mission Navigational Com- puter, from a replica of a 2,100-year-old geared computer to an iPad. The history of communicating and comput- ing is all here. Even an original Pony Express mail bag." There you have it.
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