Retired UT-Arlington professor's collection illustrates history of computing

Computers with switches. Black-and-white monitors. A thick hand-held device from Apple that was a market failure.

These are some of the items in Gil Carrick’s collection of more than 800 computers and computer parts that he hopes will make up the Arlington Museum of Information Technology someday.

"From a certain perspective, it’s just junk," Carrick said with a smile.

But the retired University of Texas at Arlington computer science professor’s collection can help illustrate one of the most important chapters in history — when explained properly.

Computer punch cards, including one from 1944 with "War Department" stamped on it, have data that are now useless but stand as one of the early uses of computers.

Computers with switches and almost antique-looking monitors were some of the first personal computers.

"You had to put your program in through the switches and do it all by hand," Carrick said.

One of the hefty, switch-laden computers, the IMSAI, is the same model that Matthew Broderick’s character used to bring the world to the brink of nuclear war in the 1983 movie War Games.

And that thick Apple Newton from the 1990s? It was a dud for its failure to recognize touch-screen handwriting but a step toward handwriting recognition that was made workable by Palm Inc.

Some of it is on display at the Arlington Public Library, some at Nedderman Hall at UT-Arlington. Much of it is in storage. Carrick wants it all to be in its own museum in Arlington someday.

"If you’re going to have a more comprehensive tourism model, you need an intellectual model, I think," he said.

Carrick said he wants to display parts of the collection at public buildings and in office lobbies to generate more interest. He wants to build up an endowment — there is none now.

"So far, most of the people involved in it are geeks," he said. "We don’t know how to manage things. We don’t know how to get grants."

Computer curators said collections like Carrick’s are important repositories of human innovation — but it’s sometimes hard to get the general public excited about them.

"That’s something I’ve been struggling with at the Smithsonian for 20 years, and I don’t have an answer," said Paul Ceruzzi, curator of aerospace, computing and electronics at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.

Ceruzzi, author of A History of Modern Computing, said old computers are so important that future archaeologists will celebrate the discovery of a 20th-century hard drive as much as today’s do when they unearth a stone tablet from Mesopotamia.

Chris Garcia, a curator at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif., said entire swaths of history such as that of the Cold War, spaceflight or the U.S. Census Bureau’s early use of punch cards cannot be told without including computers in the narrative.

George Keremedijiev, director of the American Information Age Museum in Bozeman, Mont., said the way to make old computers relevant is to put them in context.

For example, he said, it would take 30,000 900-pound IBM hard drives from 1964 to equal the memory of today’s iPod.

"So many young people come [to the museum] unprepared, and they’re shocked as to how many years it took for the computer to evolve," Keremedijiev said.