The Retro Roadshow + The Museum of the Human Web
The Retro Roadshow was delighted to be invited to exhibit some of our coolest and most historically-significant artifacts at the launch party for a really awesome event in San Francisco called "The Museum of the Human Web." This event is being staged by the amazing team at Parallel Web Systems, and their incredible thoughtfulness and attention to detail is apparent in every nook and cranny of the exhibit space. The whole event is focused on the evolution of the Web before the age of AI, so they asked us to bring three computers that could help tell the story of the human-created Internet.
The earliest item we brought is our IBM PC 5150. This was something they were specifically looking for, in part because it’s such an iconic design, and in part as a representation of the early days of “BBSes” - text-based online communities that predate the Web. We initially had the PC running a “Matrix style” screensaver as a fun visual for attendees who wanted a photo-op with this cool machine.
Our IBM PC 5150 running a “Matrix-style” screensaver at the Museum of the Human Web
Later in the evening, we switched up the PC and had it running the delightful text-adventure game Zork - both because it’s super fun, and as a quasi-representation of what it felt like to play early text-based “door games” hosted on BBS systems. This turned out be a good choice - folks were crowded around the machine playing Zork for the rest of the night!
Along with the IBM PC, we also brought our NeXT Cube. Given that the event was showcasing the history of the Web, this was an obvious choice for us: literally the same type of computer that was used by Sir Tim Berners-Lee to create the first web server, first web browser, and the HTML coding language the whole Web is built with. The physical layout of the space prevented us from running power cords to the Cube and letting people play with its fascinating NeXTstep OS, but it still proved to be a very popular exhibit.
Perhaps the most memorable part of the experience was exhibiting our Macintosh SE/30 - a machine that we've spent decades restoring and upgrading. We set up our SE/30 to run the Electronic Whole Earth Catalog - a brilliant piece of software from 1988 which due to its hypertext-and-graphics design, is now often cited as a direct precursor to the World Wide Web. However, what made this setup especially significant for us was the fact that our Mac was displayed alongside the original handwritten memo that led to Apple receiving an early round of venture capital funding in 1977 - a truly one-of-a-kind artifact of tech/cultural history.
We really love all the little details in this document:
"Business: Home - hobby computers"
"Proposed financing: $600,000"
"Market: >$500m"
"A leading company in a hot biz"
"$600k buys 10%, very rich deal but management questionable for this evaluation"
“While management believes that the market for personal computers will grow rapidly, a large market for personal computers is not assured and development of the market will require education of potential personal computer customers. Development of the market will be both time-consuming and expensive.”
For context, buying 10% of Apple today would cost you somewhere around $400 billion dollars...
All-in-all, it was a delight and honor to participate in this fun and educational event, and we’re very grateful to the whole Parallel team for bringing us in!
