Gadgetory

everything here works and is meant to be opened up played with tinkered with and researched I think there is something about the tactility of the computers that really appeals to them you know the keyboards have a really firm responsiveness and you can actually hear the whirring and the crunching of the of the disk drives my name is Lori Emerson and I'm director of the media archaeology lab the media archaeology lab is a place for hands-on experimentation teaching and research with tech that goes back to the late 19th century through the early to late 20th century the lab started in 2009 when I decided that I wanted to see what difference it would make to have the original computer that a Canadian poet by the name of BP nickel he used an apple 2e and wrote it and basic this is actually a so-called manuscript version of it that his widow gave me for better for worse at some point I thought it would be great to start bringing in Commodore 64's into the lab just to compare the other contemporary computer to the Apple 2e and then the lab just kind of blew up from there and I started making friends with people on eBay and convincing them to give me the things that they were selling online instead of me buying them from them it's really interesting watching students react to computers in the lab because they they walk in and they will usually immediately gasp and giggle and then they seem to be overcome with a feeling of nostalgia but it's nostalgia for an era that they didn't live through so it's curious and I can't quite figure it out for one thing with the Apple Macintosh it really becomes clear that Steve Jobs is trying to force the public to really accept this new graphical user interface and force people to become comfortable with using the mouse because the keyboard is unusually small because it lacks arrow keys I get a lot of excitement over the computer that was in Legally Blonde the iBook the clamshell for me what's most exciting about the iBook clamshell is the fact that we've got it set up with a phone line that we can get on the internet using the iBook and we can fire up Netscape from 1997 and just see what happens so that's really thrilling for a lot of people and for me as well right above these computers we have a really extensive collection of software so students researchers people from the public can come in and play text adventure games from the late 1970s and 1980s I think probably the Apple 2e is my favorite Apple has taken the Apple to refined its design and added some of the most popular features available on personal computers the result is the Apple 2e it's just so sweet I love the the whirring of the drives when you when you start it up and the and the cute beep and I love the fact that I can pull it out and take the lid off and even I with a PhD in poetry can figure out how to swap boards in and out and that's really what's really thrilling for me so we do have a lot of apples in the lab but I have them more as a out of a sense of criticality than a sense of admiration they're here to mostly get people to think about how things were and how things could have been and how things still could be in with the design of computers you