The New Media Museum is best understood when framed as an extension of Mary E. Hopper’s career. There have been many cycles of expansion and hibernation, and the reasons for expanding the Collections, creating Exhibits and starting Projects can be traced to her activities.
Here is a long, gory description of why and how the museum evolved.
The story ends with a description of where it is, and is not, today.
1970s
Programming & PLATO
The story of the New Media Museum starts when Hopper met her first computer. The system was a Teletype with paper tape and an acoustic coupler for a telephone handset. It was an interface to an IBM Mainframe running the TSS operating system.
Hopper got to know the computer while taking four years of programming classes in High School.
She also encountered PLATO, an educational system from the University of Illinois. She even got to play with Spacewar and Empire on the system. This had a huge impact on her career. It sowed the seeds of her interest in how to use computers in education with a focus on how to make worlds to navigate various kinds of knowledge.
Moving On …
Hopper took a penchant for programming and PLATO, a stack of computer printouts and a few rolls of paper tape off to Purdue University after she graduated from High School.
1980s
Purdue
After focusing on non-computer related things at Purdue, Hopper took a course in Instructional Media and Design. That’s where she encountered an Apple II during an assignment that required her to use a KoalaPad to create a graphic. It wasn’t much, but it was enough. An itch to get back to computers and programming struck.
She took the course EDCI 460: Educational Technology for Teaching and Learning the next semester. These were the textbooks.
The course even covered PLATO. Better yet, since there was cross-talk between the program she was in at Purdue and the PLATO group at U. of Illinois, there were even some materials about the system that she got to keep when they were surplused by the department.
After that course, she changed her major to Instructional Design specializing in Educational Computing.
Then she started teaching EDCI 460.
Lawler
As happens in doctoral programs, the time came to choose an advisor. Robert Lawler was a new faculty member in the program.
The department head suggested that Hopper choose him as an advisor.
Logo
One aspect of working with Lawler was knowing that one of his doctoral advisors at MIT was Seymour Papert, author of Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas.
Here’s a link to a video of a talk by Seymour Papert at Purdue.
Lawler developed and taught EDCI 562: Educational Applications of Logo.
Hopper helped him at first and then taught it herself later on. This caused her to be well versed in various versions of the language.
She also bought an Apple IIe and various types of Logo to have at home.
AI
Another important aspect of working with Lawler was that his other doctoral advisor at MIT was Marvin Minksy, author of The Society of Mind.
Here’s a link to a video of a talk by Marvin Minsky at Purdue.
Together, Minsky and Papert, had founded MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Lab. That is why it was no surprise that Lawler developed and taught ED 591: AI and Education, and Hopper assisted him with that as well.
LEGO
Lawler brought a LEGO system that was controlled with Logo to Purdue. It was put in a lab where all his courses used it, and Hopper supported it. Here’s a similar set that came from eBay and is now in the New Media Museum’s Educational Robotics Collection.
Apple
Hopper worked on an Apple funded research project directed by Lawler. The goal was to examine the feasibility and impact of using Logo for introducing pre-reading skills to children at Head Start.
This project used a system that married a TI-99 computer to an Apple II in the form of a TI-99 Sprite board. It was installed in an Apple IIe, and then the monitor was attached to the card rather than the Apple IIe’s output. The Apple IIe became a TI-99 with 16 independently addressable sprites that could be controlled with Logo.
The New Media Museum has some of boards that were surplused by Purdue.
Hopper and Lawler did a poster for a conference about the project.
Hopper, M. E. and Lawler, R. W. (1991, August). Pre-Readers’ Word Worlds: Results of Experiences with Young Children and New Directions [Poster]. Thirteenth Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, Evanston, IL.
Working with the children at Headstart was the main goal of the Apple project, but there was also a technical goal of producing emulations of the TI 99 Sprite-Logo System for Macintosh computers. Hopper spearheaded making demos in Object Logo and Macromind Director. She also programmed a HyperCard demo with sixteen programmable sprites.
Here’s a link to the final report given to Apple at the conclusion of the project.
Hopper, M. E. & Lawler, R. W. (1997). A Progress Report for the Head Start-Apple Logo Project. In R. W. Lawler (Ed.), Learning and Computing: A Dual-Medium Book (pp. 36-40). UK: Intellect Books.
This work led to a starter set for the New Media Museum’s Learning and Computing Collection.
Hyper Things
One area where Lawler’s and Hopper’s academic interests overlapped was hypertext and hypermedia systems. Lawler was on the cutting edge of this because he used various systems in his research, which he now calls the Natural Learning Case Study Archives.
Lawler taught ED591K: HyperCard, and Hopper eventually did, too.
Hopper was enthralled with HyperCard. She became particularly attached to a version of it that ran on a Apple IIGS with ProDOS. It was a full color version years before there was a color version of Macs. This led her to get an Apple IIGS of her own so that she could create her own worlds at home.
She was also intrigued with the concept of hypertext and hypermedia. Her collection of related material grew to include books, articles and documentation. This included Vannevar Bush’s As We May Think and Ted Nelson’s Literary Machines.
She also collected information about the numerous software systems as described in Jeff Conklin’s article Hypertext: An Introductionand Survey.
The proceedings of ACM’s HYPERTEXT ’87 and HYPERTEXT ’89 conferences provided insight into the state of the art at the time.
Hopper had a variety of software systems and played around with recreating the ACM Hypertext on Hypertext, and she created an assignment for her students to use the same content in different systems to understand the strengths and weaknesses of each one.
Worlds
Hopper began focusing on how hypermedia systems could be used to create interactive visual worlds with links to content.
This has remained a primary focus throughout her career.
It was neat to watch Cosmic Osmo evolve into Myst, and it was key see how a 2D system could be used to create the illusion of 3D space. It was also fun to know that it was HyperCard under the hood.
There was a brief foray into virtual reality, but it was clear that the state of that art, especially for low-cost systems afordable in education, was not where it needed to be then. That interest was shelved for decades.
These activities led to a starter set for the New Media Museum’s collections of Knowledge Navigation, Hypermedia, Worlds and Immersive Media.
Careers Systems
Hopper used her HyperCard skills to help William LeBold in Freshman Engineering to develop a Engineering Career System for use in a course that helped engineering students pick a School of Engineering.
Here are a few publications with more about the work.
Hopper, M. E., LeBold, W. K., Feghali, A. A. (1991). A Hypermedia-Based Problem Solving Approach to Engineering, Learning, Working, and Playing. Frontiers in Education Conference Proceedings, 73-78.
LeBold, W. K., Hopper, M. E., Feghali, A. A. (1991). A Hypermedia Solution to a Hyper Problem: Personalized Computer Engineering Career System. ASEE-IEEE Annual Conference Proceedings: Educational Research and Methods Division, 482-488.
Hopper did a demo of the Engineering Career System for a group in the School of Education, and this led to the Education Career System, then eventually a university wide Purdue Career System.
Suns
Just as work on the career systems was winding down, news came that the School of Engineering was going to get a new large lab of Sun computers. These were UNIX systems that did not run HyperCard. LeBold told Hopper to convert everything to something that would run on Suns.
Hopper figured out how to do it, but it wasn’t easy and took some research. There was something called HyperNews that ran on Suns, and it could read HIFF files. Meanwhile, the HyperCard clone Toolbook could import HyperCard files and export HIFF, so that’s how the conversion was done.
It was not straightforward, nor without glitches. Once it was finished, the upside was that the data was free of HyperCard. It was then relatively easy to import it into other systems. It was even uploaded to Gopher.
After the system was working on Suns, a specification for the Web came out.
The system was converted to that, too. It was an afterthought, but the Purdue Career System was one of the earliest, largest university sites on the Web.
Records of this work are in the New Media Museum’s archives.
Dissertation
Developing hypermedia in a networked environment was challenging, at best. It was clear that there would be more need for it as the emerging internet became more prevalent.
Hopper decided to study how issues in older educational computing projects became intertwined with new problems in networked environments. She studied the Purdue Career Systems, Context32 (Intermedia, Brown), TODOR (Athena, MIT) and Physical Geology Tutor (AthenaMuse, MIT).
It was particularly interesting to study a project that used AthenaMuse because it was used to create the visual and spatial applications that were done by the Visual Computing Group at Athena. Some of those were similar to what she hoped to create herself.
The dissertation is available online Educational Courseware Production in Advanced Computing Environments (Table of Contents).
Moving On …
Hopper finished her Ph. D., and then she packed up and moved to Boston. Her “personal collection” was packed into around a hundred boxes that took up a significant chunk of a UHaul truck.
The collection had what she needed to run the applications that she taught and studied during her Ph.D. program. There was an assortment of Apples along with a PC and a few gaming systems. There was also software for teaching Educational Computing, Logo, Robotics, and Hypermedia.
Little did she know how much that collection would grow, and in what directions, in the near future.
1990s
Studio-E
Things didn’t go like Hopper thought they would when she got to Boston, and skipping the gory details, six months later she owned a small, popular computer business named Studio-E at 1206 Massachusetts Ave. in Harvard Square (between Bow and Arrow). It offered walk-in self-service, instruction and production for individuals, businesses and universities.
Hopper’s computers from Purdue formed the initial set up. However, PCs running Applications like Word Perfect were the main thing that people were willing to pay to use. PCs soon outnumbered the Apple computers.
Studio-E served thousands of customers, and Hopper became known by the moniker “The Computer Lady.” It was a fun time to be in Harvard Square — meals from Bartley’s or The Tasty, and Good Will Hunting filmed next door!
The self-service business was popular, but less lucrative than contract work. This was particularly true after the Web took off, and Hopper was knowledgeable about Web publishing.
Studio-E rebranded as “Electronic Publishing and Consulting,” and moved to a nicer, more private office at 1208 Massachusetts Avenue (above Oona’s).
That is where Hopper completed number of of Web projects including Lawler’s Learning and Computing and Minsky’s The Society of Mind.
Moving On …
The computer hardware and software for the public lab was no longer needed and wouldn’t fit in the upstairs office. So, Hopper did what any Cantabrigian would do at that time. She packed it up and moved it to the illustrious Metropolitan Storage.
The collection that came to Boston from Purdue had more than doubled. There were twice as many Apples and a dozen PCs. There was an array of peripherals (printers, scanners etc.) and enough furniture for a thousand square foot lab with twenty stations. There was also an additional hundred boxes of Software & Documentation.
The collection that was tightly packed into a hundred square feet then is now the core of the New Media Museum’s Personal Computer Collection.
MIT
Steve Lerman, a professor at MIT and member of her doctoral committee, approached Hopper with a contract to finish the documentation for AthenaMuse 2.2. It was the software used in one of the projects that she studied at MIT. It was the multimedia extensions to X-Windows, but it was not propagated through the X-Consortium. Hopper revised the code for consistency and corrected the documentation to match. The final document was shared with members of the consortium that contributed to the project (e.g. Sun Microsystems, multiple government agencies).
Here’s the link and reference to it.
Ali-Ahmad, et.al. [Hopper, M. E. (Ed.)] (1996). AthenaMuse 2.2 Documentation. Cambridge, MA: Center for Educational Computing Initiatives, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
NMIS
After Hopper finished AthenaMuse 2.2, Lerman asked her to work on a final report about Networked Multimedia Information Services (NMIS). It was a collection of experiments and research studies that explored the cutting edge of internet-delivered multimedia. It was jointly undertaken by MIT, Dartmouth and CMU. IBM and Turner Broadcasting were corporate sponsors operating under grants from DARPA and the NSF.
Here’s the reference and link to it.
Hopper, M. E. (Ed.) (1997). Networked Multimedia Information Services: Final report. Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Center for Educational Computing Initiatives.
Hopper collected information using ethnographic interviews, and she had to do a LOT of background research to understand the history and technical details of what she was hearing.
The resulting boxes of documentation were the starter set for the New Media Museum’s Services Collection.
Postdoc@MIT
Just as the NMIS project was winding down, a new graduate program was starting up. It was Comparative Media Studies, and Hopper became the first Post Doctoral Associate in the program.
She helped teach 21L.015 Introduction to Media Studies (MIT). The New Media Museum has an archive of the Web site and course materials.
She also managed the MIT Media in Transition Project.
This role included serving as co-organizer for the Media-in-Transition International Conference.
The New Media Museum has an archive of transcripts of all events and printouts of everything on the Web site Media in Transition Collection.
One of the Media in Transition’s parent organizations was the Communications Forum, and there was high overlap between their activities. Therefore, Hopper’s duties also included helping David Thorburn to run the Communications Forum. The New Media Museum has a digital and hardcopy archive of that Web site, too.
This is a logo that Mary Hopper helped David Thorburn create.
This is a poster that is available to display.
What Next?
Postdoctoral positions are not supposed to go on for long — by definition, they are term limited appointments, so they cannot.
As the time neared for Hopper to move on from her position at MIT, there were two competing paths forward. One was applying to traditional faculty jobs in Educational Technology programs (which MIT did not have at the time). The other was to head to Library School to get that MLS she probably should have gotten instead of one of her Graduate specializations at Purdue.
She decided to try both and see which one turned out best.
Simmons
Hopper went to Simmons School of Library and Information Science and took courses in Cataloging, Reference, Digital Libraries and Archives. She also completed an internship in MIT’s Institute Archives and Special Collections.
Digital Darkness?
Digital Dark Age was a concept that Hopper encountered around this time.
On one hand, there were legitimate criticisms of the concept in academia.
On the other hand, Hopper’s experiences at Studio-E helping the general public retrieve data told her that few people had the skills and equipment to retrieve and preserve digital data. She also encountered plenty of horror stories while researching academic computing projects.
Her intuition told her that, while being an alarmist wasn’t a good idea at that point in her career, it would be best to take the concept seriously herself.
Up until that time, she had seen her computers and software from Studio-E as an educational resource for courses like the ones she taught at Purdue. The fact that she could run almost any software ever made for personal computers was just a by-product.
Now her goals for keeping the Personal Computing Collection evolved to include a strong preservation component. Instead of the computer collection being just a way to run old educational software, it became a resource for digital preservation.
That is at the heart of the New Media Museum’s PC 2100 Project that aims to maintain a “living archive” that will continue to run standard personal computing hardware and software until the year 2100 and beyond.
Moving On …
Hopper’s time at MIT led to a massive amount of documentation. It got out of control and so another hundred boxes or so joined their brethren in a yet larger space at Metropolitan Storage.
2000s
Lesley
Hopper took a position as Assistant Professor of Technology in Education at Lesley University. She helped to offer a Master’s program that was delivered in an “intensive face-to-face weekend format” to 45 cohorts of teachers in 15 states. She also “mentored” (aka supervised) over 40 adjunct faculty and taught courses herself.
The specifics of “intensive weekend format” were that she, or an adjunct, would fly to where a course was offered on Friday, teach Friday 5 PM – 10 PM, Saturday 8 AM – 5 PM, and Sunday 8 AM – 5 PM, then fly home Sunday. Two weekends, plus online instruction equated to a semester.
“Boxes”
The trickiest part about Hopper’s role was that the courses she “mentored” required collections of materials that were packed into “boxes” and sent to the sites ahead of time so they would be there in time for the course. Each of the courses Hopper managed had different “boxes,” and she was responsible for coordinating the shipping to make sure everybody had what they needed for teaching when they got there, including herself.
Hopper was always afraid there would be a shipping snafu, and she would end up with no materials. She eventually got her own collection, shipped it to her hotel room, and then took it to the site. Then she would ship it home before going to the airport on the last day. This provided peace of mind. When the boxes from Lesley showed up (which they always did), then she just had more materials to go around, including some goodies in her personal collection that were different than what was in the “box” from Lesley.
When she left Lesley, she still had her “boxes” for each course she taught.
Those are now part of the New Media Museum’s collections.
Robo Wrangler
Hopper managed ECOMP 5018: Introduction to Educational Robotics.
It was a popular course, and she supervised 15 adjunct faculty who taught it to over 300 students across the country each year.
She also taught the course ten times herself (SC, GA, WI, NV and WA).
Here are two events where Hopper presented as “Robo Wrangler.”
Hopper, M. E. (2005, July). Getting Started with Robotics: Clubs, Competitions and Communities [Birds of a Feather Session]. National Educational Computing Conference, Philadelphia, PA.
Hopper, M.E. & LaFountain, D. (2004, June). Robotics in the Classroom [Birds of a Feather Session]. National Educational Computing Conference, New Orleans, LA.
Hopper ended up with even more kinds of Logo, LEGO and other robots than she already had accumulated while working with Lawler at Purdue. Here’s a glimpse of some, but not all, of them.
These are in the New Media Museum’s Educational Robotics Collection.
Multimedia
Playing with Robots was fun, but the course ECOMP 5016: Teaching and Learning with Multimedia was nearer and dearer to Hopper’s heart.
She mentored 15 adjunct faculty who taught the course, managed the boxes, and taught the course herself four times in SC, GA and CO.
The resources that Hopper added to her personal collection to be shipped to sites included numerous books about multimedia and a variety of audio and video digitizing equipment. This is part of the New Media Museum collection, but has not been documented (yet).
“Structures”
Finally, there was a required course called ECOMP 7100: Fundamentals of Computer Structure. Hopper was not responsible for mentoring it or shipping the boxes, but she was asked to teach it three times in SC.
This is where Hopper’s years of managing the hardware and software in computer labs at Purdue and her own Studio-E came in handy.
The course was intended to improve teacher’s proficiency with computers by covering tech language (geek-speak), computing history, hardware identification, trouble shooting, upgrades, basic maintenance and repair as well as configuring operating systems (among other things).
Here are some books from the course that are in the New Media Museum’s Personal Computing Collection (particularly PCs because none of the schools had Apple computers).
There was also quite a bit added to the overall Computation Collection.
Moving On …
After “mentoring” dozens of adjunct faculty, shipping hundreds of boxes, teaching more than a thousand teachers, and racking up more than a 100,000 frequent flyer miles, Hopper moved on to other things.
None of the them required the stuff in the boxes for courses at Lesley. So, those went to hibernate with the rest of Hopper’s stuff in a yet larger space, now up to hundreds of square feet, at Metropolitan Storage.
Another dozen or so computers from the “Lesley Years” were added to the collection from Purdue and Studio-E. These were mostly PCs for robotics interfaces and multimedia digitizing.
Hopper’s personal course “boxes” went there, too. Now there were well over a thousand boxes of software and documentation covering Educational Computing, Logo, Robotics and Multimedia/Hypermedia.
Over the years, as the collection stashed at Metropolitan Storage grew larger, and larger, Hopper jokingly called the space her “digital den.”
2010s
“Pop-Up Labs”
Hopper taught courses for a number of universities in the Boston area.
They were “mostly” lecture format, but Hopper would pull some of her collection out of storage to share on “pop-up lab” days so students could get hands on experience with some of the technologies that she talked about in her lectures. Hopper added a few more goodies to the labs each semester. However, things got out of hand — it started to take a UHaul truck to get the collection to the “pop-up lab days.”
Some of her students were in Game Design programs, and they were being introduced to the history of gaming by seeing video clips of classic games.
It occurred to Hopper that she had everything she needed in her extensive Gaming Collection to let them experience the games first hand.
There was one fly in that ointment, though. Where to do it?
The “pop-up lab” approach was already out of control — adding a computer lab to the mix was out of the question.
Hopper also became aware of other programs in Game Design in the Boston area that might also benefit from a way to have their students interact with older, iconic games on the original platforms.
Hummm, what to do?
Digital Den@Metropolitan
Hopper realized it would be more practical to move students to the collection rather than the collection to students. So, she came up with a plan to share the collection lurking in her “Digital Den” at Metropolitan Storage.
Hopper had been a loyal customer there for well over a decade, so in the Spring of 2013 she approached the management team to ask if it would be possible to move part of her collection to a more accessible space on the first floor so that she could do “lab days” for students. They were very supportive of the idea, and offered her a space near the entrance. They even painted it and installed electrical outlets.
The “relatively” public site was ready by July of 2013 and Hopper’s Digital Den was born. Here’s a peak at what it looked like. It held only part of the collection — the rest was still sitting in a different space upstairs.
Hopper also set up a Web site for Digital Den to communicate with students and faculty in the area.
Then a funny thing happened — Digital Den spawned a computer museum.
This resulted from things that happened at Swapfest: Flea at MIT (Flea@MIT) over the course of the summer of 2013 while the space at Metropolitan Storage was taking shape.
Flea@MIT
The Flea@MIT was an event that Hopper attended from time to time since setting up Studio-E when she first got to town in the early 1990s. Here is a blurb on the Web site about it.
The MIT Radio Society, in conjunction with the MIT UHF Repeater Association, the MIT Electronics Research Society, and the Harvard Wireless Club, sponsors a Swapfest on the third Sunday of each month, April through October. This is a place to buy, sell, and swap amateur radio, electronic, and computer equipment. Hams and non-hams alike are welcome.
That description doesn’t do it justice. You have to go to understand it.
Hopper started dropping by during that summer to look for some vintage gaming equipment to beef up her Gaming Collection at Digital Den.
She had expanded the collection “some” already by shopping at Replay’d and Game Underground, but Flea@MIT was down the street from Digital Den, so it was hard to resist looking for just a few more things.
While she was wandering around browsing, she would get to chatting about what she was doing at Metropolitan Storage. A frequent response was “That sounds like a museum.” At first she laughed, but the more it happened, the more she thought, “Yeah, sort of, I guess.”
Now it’s important to understand, as she did, this was a touchy subject for the tech community in the Boston area. There was a Computer Museum in Boston, but most of it was moved to Silicon Valley in 2000. That became the Computer History Museum. Only a few exhibits were left in Boston, and those ended up at the Museum of Science.
There is a document about it that was published in 2011 by Gordon Bell, one of the museum’s founders.
Out of a Closet: The Early Years of The Computer Museum
At one point that summer, Steve Finberg, the founder of Flea@MIT, was chatting with Hopper about what she was doing. He chuckled and told her that he had someone that she needed to meet. Then he led her over and introduced her to a very special person named Bill German.
It turned out that he had a massive computer collection and hoped to start a computer museum. He also had encyclopedic knowledge about computing history in general, and computing history in the Boston area specifically. He was well versed in the companies associated with what is sometimes called the Massachusetts Miracle (Digital Equipment Corporation, Data General, Wang Laboratories, Prime Computer and Apollo Computer).
Hopper went to New Hampshire to visit German and see the collection.
Here is a video Hopper shot of just a fraction of what he had.
Hopper also met Adam Rosen at the Flea@MIT that summer. He was the Owner of the Vintage Mac Museum and a well-known figure in the national vintage Apple community.
There were also many conversations beyond the Flea@MIT.
For example, Hopper talked with George Fifield about collaborations during events at the Boston Cyberarts Gallery and Dan Hermes of Art Technology New England (ATNE). Later on Hopper participated in a related event at the Cyberarts Gallery (Digital Arts Preservation in the Northeast).
She also spoke with Gavin Kleespies at the Cambridge Historical Society.
A lot of people mentioned the Rhode Island Computer Museum (RICM), so she went for a visit. Here’s a video that Hopper shot of Mike Thompson explaining the restoration of a PDP-9.
Michael Thompson mentioned The Living Computer Museum in the video.
He wasn’t the first person to mention it. Almost everybody did.
Living Computer Museum
After conversations covered the old museum in Boston, and what moved where, the topic of the Living Computer Museum would come up. It was in Seattle and founded by Paul Allen. As the name indicated, it used a “living computer museum” model.
One point of agreement among computer history enthusiast Hopper talked to was that, if there were to be a(nother) museum, it would be more like the Living Computer Museum than the Computer History Museum.
After visiting the Living Computer Museum (LCM Visit!), Hopper realized that the “personal computer” area of the Living Computer Museum looked a lot like the labs that she had managed. Basically, in a “living computing” model, there was little difference between “stations” in educational computing lingo and “exhibits” in museum lingo.
That being the case, then she already had a lot of “exhibits.” What’s more, there could be many more from German’s and Rosen’s collections, along with contributions from Replay’d, Game Underground, Boston Cyberarts and ATNE. Working together, they could create something like the Living Computer Museum (sans mainframes).
What to do?
Hopper had hit a nerve that summer while she was setting up Digital Den at Metropolitan Storage. She had stumbled upon a lot of pent-up, latent energy around the idea of a(nother) computer museum in the area.
The question was, “What to do now?”
Could there be a museum?
What would it be called?
Computer Museum was a no-brainer.
Then she noticed that “new” could also stand for New England Wide.
The NEW Computer Museum was born!
But, where would it be?
Well, Hopper did have a public space down the street from the Flea@MIT.
It wasn’t very big, but …
She ran it by others, and they approved.
Then she made a logo.
Then she generated some verbiage.
The New Computer Museum’s mission was to facilitate the preservation and exhibition of a wide range of computing systems in their original state for the public to experience and enjoy first-hand.
There was a press release that got a certain amount of attention.
Then she held some open houses at Digital Den for her students, collaborators and the public.
Finally, through Digital Den, she sponsored the NEW Computer Museum Launch Party.
Launch
NEW Computer Museum Launch Party
Sunday, October 20, 2013
1st Exhibit 5-7 pm
Launch Party 7-9 pm
315 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge
Participants included Hopper of Digital Den, Adam Rosen of Vintage Mac Museum, Bill German from New Hampshire, Dan Berman, Michael Thompson and Harlan Hersey of RICM and Bryan Harwell of Replay’d.
Key attendees included George Fifield of Boston Cyberarts, Mark Check of the Museum of Science, and Steve Finberg from the Flea@MIT.
Finally, Mark Micheli did an excellent job of recording the event.
The launch party was successful!
It was also clear that that people preferred to experience “exhibits” in the context of “pop-up” events rather than in the “archive” like setting at Metropolitan Storage. In fact, more people attended the launch party than had ever visited Digital Den at Metropolitan Storage.
However, there were still problems with the pop-up model that was used for the “successful” launch party. First, it was expensive. Second, the space was not large enough for the exhibits that were there, let alone all the many more that could have been there.
Hopper started to research where she could hold larger events for less fees.
It wasn’t very hard to find the location.
Cambridge is home to the Microsoft NERD Center. NERD actually stands for New England Research & Development, so it felt right to hold NEW Computer Museum events there.
Divvying Up
The goals of Digital Den had been two-fold. One goal was to show older vintage technologies, and another goal was to showcase new immersive technologies. The Digital Den space at Metropolitan Storage reflected this. Vintage tech was on one side of the room, and newer immersive tech was on the other. Finally, vintage immersive tech and gaming systems were along the back wall, in between.
However, the goals related to the older vintage collection and the newer immersive collection diverged over the course of the summer, and it became clear that they were not the same thing. Among other things, there wasn’t enough room for both, literally.
Digital Den’s collection of immersive technology had grown. The timing was such that there was a new wave of cool products coming out, and Hopper was getting them to share with students. These are now the New Media Museum’s Immersive Media Collection (Headsets, Motion Input and Mind Control).
The public space at Digital Den was too full, and something had to give.
Hopper decided that vintage technologies would be shown within the context of sponsoring events for the NEW Computer Museum in places other than Metropolitan Storage, and she set up a separate Web site.
Most of the “vintage” collection was packed up and shifted to a different space at Metropolitan Storage in order to make more room for work with the immersive technologies. Only a small set of demos were set aside for “vintage exhibits” at NEW Computer Museum events.
Immersive technologies continued to be the work of Digital Den that was done in the space at Metropolitan Storage, and those activities were documented on Digital Den’s Web site.
The activities of Digital Den and the NEW Computer Museum were separate. Things were framed as one or the other, unless there was overlap.
It just so happened that one of those occasions was on the horizon.
Check out the history of Digital Den’s extensive activities here.
Pop-up Museum
As soon as it was clear that the NERD Center could be a space for hosting events, the collaborators agreed to try a “Pop-Up Museum.”
The event was scheduled for Friday, March 14, 2014.
Of course, it was no accident that it happened to be Pi Day.
The event was fun, and the collaborators agreed that it was a success. It had proven that collaborating to create a museum was feasible. However, everyone also agreed that “Pop-Up” events were unsustainable, and they should be put on hold until/when/if there was long-term location.
There were more social events after that, but there were no more exhibits.
Moving On …
That “Pop-Up” event in 2014 was the last time Hopper’s exhibits were shared with the public. Everything has been in hibernation ever since.
NEW Computer Museum exhibits were on hold, and she was too busy with “Immersive Media” projects as Digital Den to do Pop-Up Labs. Finally, Metropolitan Storage was closing, so she had to move out.
Luckily, she lived in a place big enough to hold her personal collection.
She didn’t have enough room for the things that were given to her in the context of founding the NEW Computer Museum, so they were loaded onto a UHaul truck and transfered to RICM.
Virtual Museum
After the collaborators decided that there would be no more public events unless there were a long term space, Hopper decided that it would be useful to create a way to show what was possible to people who had not been at the Launch and Pop-Up events.
She had been working with Unity 3D to create demos for Digital Den, so it wouldn’t be hard to make some sort of a demo. She started work on a virtual NEW Computer Museum in the spring of 2015.
The goal was to demonstrate the vision of what the “real” New Computer Museum had the potential to become. It would also be an educational resource because of the interactive experiences built into the demo as well as the content included in the Guide on the NEW Computer Museum Web site.
Hopper had a rough draft ready to show at the Flea@MIT by April, 2015.
Here’s one of many hypothetical layouts based on 10,000 sq. ft. of space.
Different versions with different layouts were created over the summer.
By the end of the summer, a version ready to share with the public was posted as a downloadable application available on the NEW Computer Museum Web site.
The video below shows a walk-through of it. The posters and almost all objects are linked to content and interactive activities on the Web. The “title poster” in each exhibit linked to a corresponding page in a page in the Guide on the NEW Computer Museum Web site, while other posters and objects linked directly to content or activities on other Web sites.
Notice the metaphor in the project was that of a ship at sea — it represented the state of the NEW Computer Museum as a ship without a port.
Here are links to the Guide and Gallery pages on this Web site.
NEW Computer Museum Guide
Earliest Computers
Pioneers Posters & Videos
“Big Iron”
Supercomputing Clubhouse
Dec & Friends
Micros Zone
Public Lab & Library
Learning & Computing
Game Arcade
Immersive Experiences
There were significant limitations on the objects that could be in the virtual museum — they were dependent upon Hopper’s time and patience for finding or making digital assets that matched real world objects. In the end, the virtual NEW Computer Museums had symbolic objects intended to indicate the themes of spaces rather than literally represent exactly what would be in a physical museum.
There was a release party on Sunday, October 18th, 2015 where the final version of the virtual edition of the NEW Computer Museum was shared with collaborators and supporters.
The demo was well received, and Hopper “took it on the road” by exhibiting it at the Vintage Computing Festival Southeast in April, 2016.
While she was making the virtual NEW Computer Museum, Hopper realized that she wasn’t differentiating her exhibits from those of the collaborators. She originally used the Digital Den Web site for that, but it was now focused on immersive media.
Hopper knew that what she would do with her collection was different than what would be possible by working with the few remaining collaborators (RICM and a few others had stopped participating by then).
She didn’t have the computers or expertise to do exhibits about mainframes, supercomputers or the Massachusetts Miracle. That was German’s role.
On the other hand, she had everything she needed to create exhibits about things like New Media, PCs (including Apples), Education, AI, Robots, Hypermedia and Immersive Media (Virtual Worlds, VR etc.).
She tended to frame her exhibits in ways more akin to her academic work and teaching in “Media” programs at MIT and elsewhere, so she decided to dub her collections and exhibits as the “New Media Museum” to differentiate it from the collaborator driven NEW Computer Museum.
She setup this New Media Museum Web site for showcasing her collections and exhibits in 2017, and then created a “Virtual” New Media Museum in SecondLife. It is still there, so just click the images below to explore it.
To be clear, the New Media Museum wasn’t something to do instead of the NEW Computer Museum. It was a parallel, not mutually exclusive, activity.
If there were a physical location for a museum in Boston, a few of the original collaborators would probably have still been involved.
Around 2018 Hopper got too busy to spend time on museum work.
Starting a museum wasn’t off of the table, but it was back-burner.
Then the unexpected happened.
Sad Ending
Over the course of just a few years, four key men passed away.
Adam Rosen, Vintage Mac Museum (August 31, 2019)
William German, Mega Computer Collector & Historian (June 3, 2020)
Steve Finberg, MIT Radio Society & Swapfest, Flea at MIT (April 23, 2021)
George Fifield, Boston Cyberarts (November 11, 2022)
It was devastating. There are no words to capture the loss to the technology community in the Boston area and the entire Northeast.
Without these men, the vision of what the NEW Computer Museum could be was gone. Hopper didn’t close down the NEW Computer Museum Web site. Instead, she left it as a tribute to them and what might have been.
2020s
What Now?
That is a question with no clear answer.
The Collections and Exhibits have been experienced by tens of thousands of people over time and space. This includes students and attendees at events across the county (described here and on the Digital Den Web site).
However, this is what’s been safely hibernating in storage for a decade.
- Over a hundred personal computers of most major brands
- Key peripherals such as drives and printers
- Dozens of gaming systems, headsets and unique interfaces
- Over a thousand boxes of software, documentation, “artifacts” etc.
- Operating system, utility and productivity software for most brands of personal computers
- Devices for playing and digitizing audio and video
- Enough furniture to accommodate over fifty “stations” for exhibits
Less than half of this is documented in detail on the Web site (so far).
It all takes up more than a thousand square feet of space, packed.
It could fill over 5,000 square feet of space if it were unpacked and set up in an educational computer lab or museum setting.
A physical location will happen sometime, somewhere …
However, the current focus isn’t on that — it is on the Projects.
In the meantime, there is a new project intended to address the lack of a dedicated media or computer museum in Boston.
NMM@Boston
One thread of discussion among the NEW Computer Museum collaborators was about the degree to which the current institutions in Boston could address the same goals as the NEW Computer Museum. The conclusion was that they each had bits and pieces that overlapped with the vision of what the NEW Computer Museum could become, but media and computer history specific exhibits would be piecemeal and distributed, while a “living museum” would never be the mission of any of them.
That being said, it doesn’t mean that there is no media or computing history in Boston museums. On the contrary, it is just the opposite.
There is plenty to see and do, if you know where to look.
Here’s a guide to learning about media and computing in the Boston area.
NMM@Boston
Media & Perception
Harvard’s Mark I & Hopper
MIT’s Whirlwind & Forrester
Artificial Intelligence & Robots
Logo & LEGO
Games & Immersion
Micro Center & MIT Flea
New Worlds
Hopper has also continued her “Virtual Museum” experiments.
“Web Worlds” are her newest approach to making virtual museums, and they serve as interfaces to content on the New Media Museum’s Web site. They are scenes created in the virtual world SecondLife and then photographed with the built in 360° image capture function. The resulting 360° photos are posted on the Kuula 360° photo sharing service in order to overlay links to the Web.
You can now step in and explore the New Media Museum on the Web!
Touch the interactive 360° image to explore it. Click on objects to find out about them.
If you can’t see it, or it isn’t working, you can also see it on Kuula.
Here is a companion to the New Media Museum Welcome Area above. It is a virtual field trip to the best (virtual) computer museums in the world!
Touch the 360° image to begin exploring, objects to learn about them, “i”s to learn about the museums, and doors to enter the virtual museums.
If you can’t see it, or it isn’t working, you can also see it on Kuula.
See this post for the backstory and a scavenger hunt!
Here is a fun little new annex to the New Media Museum to enjoy exploring!
Touch the 360° image to begin exploring.
You can also see it on Kuula.
Enjoy!
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