The subject of this year's special exhibition is "Open Source: Life Begins at Forty".
The world today is completely unimaginable without the smartphones and tablets we carry in our pockets to interact with the digital world and do our day-to-day business. But how did we end up here? In my exhibition, I invite everyone to explore the sheer and vast landscape of pocketable computing devices we used to keep in our pockets before Apple and Google established a secure duopoly. You are going to experience different form factors of mobile devices, as well as the software they used to run. Everything on display will be available for interaction! Azer Abdullaev
Let's time travel to 1990 to the USSR. There are two exhibits here. In the 1980s, the USSR institutions and facilities started actively using computers for different purposes. There were different architectures, and PDP-11 clones were the popular ones. It was clear for Soviet engineers that they were behind the West. Later they could obtain sources of UNIX using Academnet and create a Soviet UNIX variant called DEMOS. It gave a boost to connecting computers using modems and UUCP – not only for academic, but for all purposes – to the network called RELCOM. In 1990, a historic call to Helsinki connected the Soviet Union to the Internet. We'll see what it looked like and can send emails to 1990! Unfortunately, the big Soviet machines are not available anymore – we have to use FPGA simulation. And, because of the necessity of education, many computers were created for home and educational use. One of the most popular computers was the BK-0010-01, a 16-bit computer with the same PDP-11 architecture – the "younger sister" of a bigger computer, sharing the architecture. Students learned programming languages and how to use computers in general, and thousands of games and other software were created for them just by people at home, while there was almost no official software. Eugene Bolshakoff
The BBC Microcomputers are a series of 8-bit computers from the early 1980s designed by Acorn Computers, built to meet the specifications of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) for the BBC's Computer Literacy Project. The BBC Model B has a 6502 CPU and 32KB of RAM whilst the BBC Master has a 65C12 variant of the 6502 and 128KB of RAM. Both systems can display Teletext using the Acorn Teletext Adapter and then built in the Mullard SAA5050 Teletext character generator. Additional processing power and memory could be added via a coprocessor unit, options included a 65C02 CPU, Z80, Intel 80186, and ARM Evaluation System. Graham Hooley
In the early days, software was mostly open source, and this open source software was the driving force that made computers interesting to many people in the first place. Later on, open source software such as GNU and Linux, and initially also Unix, enabled smaller projects to provide larger systems without having to reinvent the wheel. Nowadays, many vintage computing systems can hardly be experienced or made usable without open source emulators and other free tools. Forty years ago, Richard Stallman founded the Free Software Foundation: Reason enough to take a historical and contemporary look at all aspects of open source in this special exhibition.
More information about the exhibitions is available in German.
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