Towards A Software Museum: Challenges and Opportunities

Although the history of automatic computation is quite young, the rapid development of electronic computers has awoken the interest of the historians, who fear important facts about early computing might get lost. The most visible result of the combined efforts of historians and computer veterans are computer museums which have been founded in several countries and have become quite popular. Computer museums belong to the category of science and engineering museums. Their exhibits tend to do more than just present some fancy machinery: they try to educate visitors, i.e., convey an understanding of how technical artifacts work and how they were perfected over generations of engineers. A prominent example of this kind of museum is the Deutsches Museum in Munich, one of the world’s most comprehensive science and engineering museums. Presenting computers in a museum has been done very successfully in the past, but has focused on only one part of the computing business (actually a small part)—hardware. The really important part—and one of the key technologies at the turn of the century and for a long time to come—is software. So why are software systems not presented in computer museums? The answer seems obvious: software is immaterial and invisible, so there is nothing to be presented. Or so we think. The authors set out to question this dogma. We are convinced that it is possible to make software an exciting exhibit in a museum a software museum. Our opinion was confirmed when we visited the newly created Mathematical Cabinet in the Deutsches Museum. Here, Friedrich L. Bauer has managed to present the most elusive subject imaginable, mathematics, to the visitors, or at least to wet their mathematical appetite by allowing a playful encounter with strange objects. It occurred to us that software, too, could be made visible, tangible and playful, and thus reach people.