Robert Recorde Room Exhibition
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On the second floor of Swansea University's world-class centre for Mathematics and Computer Science - the Computational Foundry - is a reasonably sized conference room and bookable teaching space: the Robert Recorde Room. The History of Computing Collection has placed one of its exhibitions here, a visual journey though the development of personal and home computing.
The exhibition spans three glass-fronted cabinets, labelled A, B, C. The cabinets D and E are in the Collection's other Computational Foundry exhibition, in the 4th floor Boardroom. The primary theme of the exhibition overall is the Trinity of 1977; the first major intrusion of computing into the home, and the year that computers were established as things that everyday people could own. There are, of course, secondary themes to explore.
Cabinet A focuses on Apple, from its beginnings in its' contribution to the Trinity - the Apple II, forward to the Power Macintosh, the portable Newton Messagepad 2000 (which was so widely known that even the Simpsons made a joke about it), the struggles that Apple encountered after its' co-founder Steve Jobs left the company, including the NeXTStation that Jobs developed during this time - and, as an interesting fact, was used by Sir Tim Berners-Lee when developing the software that would later become the World Wide Web - as well as the utterly iconic Mac G3 that Jobs inspired on his return to Apple, with its' vibrant lime green color on full display.
Cabinet B celebrates the achievements, rise and fall of Commodore Business Machines, starting with the KIM-1 created by MOS Technology to showcase the power and versatility of its 6502 processor, which eventually got purchased in full by CBM and turned into a kit that anybody could buy and turn into a full computer. This example was used by the University's Electrical Engineering department to control robotics, and has all of its' extra circuitry from this time still present. Commodore's contribution to the trinity, the PET 2001, is also here, along with its later and far more capable cousin the VIC-20, and its superstar sister the Commodore 64 - which remains the most sold computer of all time, followed in second place by the Amiga 500, also shown on display.
Cabinet B focuses primarily on the British market: the deceptively diminuitive Sinclair ZX-81 with paired ZX Printer, the BBC Micro B - of which our example is built in Wales, by A.B Electronics in Abercairn - along with the third installment of the Trinity, the TRS-80.
Cabinet B also displays some books written by Robert Recorde, who himself was a Welsh mathematician, known for the first usage (some may say invention) of the equals sign. His book The Whetstone of Witte is displayed open, showing the exact page where the equals sign is first known to have been used.
The last thing you may find in the exhibition is the display of memories and storage media across the middle shelf of Cabinet C; from the 1Mb (125 kilobyte) hard drive platter used in an ICL mainframe, to a DECPack hard disk used in a VAX mainframe, and more consumer-oriented storages, such as Laserdisc, 8", 5.25" and 3.5" floppy disks, ZIP disks, and an interesting example of a CD cartridge, which was abandoned after only a year.
You can view and download a guide to the exhibition, including technical details and interesting historical stories about the machines and the companies behind them, here:
