About

The Second Life Computer History Museum is a grass roots project to compile a history of computing, by those who were ‘there’ as history was being made and by professional educators who are early SL adopters. Exhibits will include interactive or photo-realistic models, written, audio or video essays, memories or links to relevant digital memorabilia.

The museum currently occupies a site on Info Island II, courtesy of the Info Island Organisation, and this is gratefully acknowledged.

Planning: The museum will be organized and planned by a Second Life Group (the SL Computer History Museum Group). Anyone intending to help organise or attend events, or to contribute exhibits should join the group.

Exhibits: The museum encourages anyone to contribute exhibits on key historical facts, especially those personally involved. Relevant fields include computers, computing, computer science, personal computers and the new web science.

The museum also encourages contributions on significant contemporary developments in these fields – to be exhibited in the ‘history in the making’ collection. Over time this could become a primary source for the history of computing from 2007 into the future.

Contributions can be submitted directly to the museum in SL and suggestions for suitable exhibits can be discussed in meetings or made via comments on the suggestions page of this blog.

Events: It is our intention to hold inworld meetings and to stage debates such as ‘which was the first digital computer?’ and competitions, such as:

build a steampunk Turing Machine

pretend to be a chatbot and fool a human judge to win the world’s first ‘UnTuring prize for avatar unintelligence’