Museo Virtuale dell’Informatica: un esempio emblematico

Paolo Paolini

«Archeologia e Calcolatori» 2009, 20, 129-144

Abstract

The Virtual Museum of the History of Italian Computer Science is a project which was started in 1996 and, due to lack of funding, was never completed (and therefore is not available to the general public). The project, which presented a complete and, for that time, innovative "design", was carried out by the Politecnico di Milano and two CNR Institutes (now unified in the ISTI - Istituto di Scienza e Tecnologie dell’Informazione "A. Faedo"). It includes an archive, where all basic information is stored, and two different interfaces: a direct search access to the archive, for specialised and expert users, and a navigation access via web, for extended public users. Information available includes documents and photographs, biographies, descriptions of achievements and innovations, etc. One special characteristic is the use of interviews to key persons, that recreates the heroic, pioneering atmosphere, typical of Computer Science in the 1950s. This use of first person narration as reported by the protagonists can be considered a precursor of solutions that became very common many years later (e.g. Web 2.0) and could be a model for archaeology in general.

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