Our friend Joe took Jen and I to Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry yesterday. Joe and Jen both grew up in the area, so they knew that place from a thousand field trips as children. With some of the exhibits, very little has changed. In the physics section, the displays were powered by twenty five year old TI 44/9As.
These things were so old that Joe and had forgotten how to hack in to the BASIC programs that were teaching us about the laws of conservation of mass and energy. I wonder if they were loading the programs from cassette tape.
The computer imaging exhibit has a glassed in server room, and Joe and I were noticing the age of the machines. Most of them were old 1994 era Macintoshes. It kind of makes me wish I had the money and time to build modernized exhibits. It was a nostalgia museum for us, but science museums should be for kids. It should inspire them to become scientists. It's sort of sad, really.
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