Chapter 5, in which I go to the Computer History Museum

As I mentioned last Wednesday, the Computer History Museum held its 2003 Fellow Awards Celebration last night & Sun sent 10 people, including me, to attend the shindig. The 1st thing that happened when we got in was that we were offered a glass of champagne each. Not a bad start to the evening, eh. There is a room that houses the machines brought out of storage; about a tenth of the total artifacts possessed by the museum. I walked in and began to walk backwards through the chronologically arranges displays. I stopped for a few moments to pay homage to the ZX Spectrum, the machine on which I wrote my 1st lines of code at the age of 4. The next thing I discovered was the original teacup from Utah that has now become the most widely used model in 3D graphics programming. Beside it was a prototype of the very 1st VR headset, designed by Ivan Sutherland who works at the lab with me. Further on, there were some extremely large supercomputers & mainframes. I was amazed to notice that these beasts actually had a physical button for each instruction that could be executed. Eventually my hunger pangs won out & I decided to hit the buffet.

While I availed myself of the scrumptious food laid out for our consumption, I chatted with a random guy from Google. He kept going on about the free food that Google gives its employees. When I asked him about the troubles his company was having with PageRank, he assured me that it was still being used & that he had not heard of any plans to retire it. I also spotted David Filo, the founder of Yahoo. Unfortunately, he was being monopolized by some other people already so I didn't have an opportunity to say hi. Oh, well; his loss. A while later I ran into my supervisor, who was being hounded by a reporter so I lent him moral support for a while until he managed to extricate himself from the situation.

When it was time for the ceremonies to begin, I headed upstairs & into the auditorium. But just before I entered, I spotted Tim Berners-Lee standing outside so I siezed the opportunity to say hi to him & personally thank him for his dogged work ensuring that the world wide web he invented didn't get destroyed by a babel of competing proprietary standards. He replied that there was still much work to be done, which puzzled me a little but I didn't want to straggle too long so I found the Sun reserved seating & took up a spot beside my supervisor, who pointed Doug Engelbart, inventor of the mouse, out to me as the man walked by us.

The ceremony kicked off with a comedian/magician type guy who provided some light entertainment before the 1st luminary, Gordon Bell, was called up on stage to receive his award & say a few words. He was followed by Tim Berners-Lee & then David Wheeler. They all regaled us with a few interesting stories from the past before stepping offstage. After the hoopla was over, we streamed out of the auditorium & went home.

The next evening I returned to the museum to hear Tim Berners-Lee give a talk. He spoke about his ongoing work to convince people that they should move away from visually marked-up content directed at humans and towards semantically marked-up content targeted at both people & machines instead. During his speech, he delved into several amusing anecdotes about the history of the Web. The most surprising aspect of the entire presentation was that he seems to use Safari as his web browser of choice! Now, while I like the UI in Safari myself, I have to come down hard on it for failing to fully support key Web standards like HTML 4 & CSS2. Naturally, the fact that the man who has devoted his life to promoting these standards should use Safari was more than a little perplexing.