DigiBarn Events: "Mac the Kid" computer family exhibit at
Santa Cruz Collects at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History
Opened: Aug 10, 2012 (closed November 2012)

Thanks to Nina Simon and the kind staff at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History for inviting me to design and co-built a very fun exhibit at the MAH which opened on August 10, 2012 as part of "Santa Cruz Collects". The concept behnd this exhibit was to display a "family" of computing systems that led to the precocious progeny, the Macintosh Kid. On the left we see the Altair 8800, the homebrew kit computer that got the whole thing going back in 1975 as far as hobbyists were concerned, and where Steve Wozniak met Steve Jobs (at a homebrew computer club meeting). On the right is the famed Alto personal computer created at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center also in the mid 1970s. The Alto is where the vision and implementation for the user experience (windows, icons, the mouse, the Ethernet, word processing, music composition, email and everything else) got its start. Put the two "parents" together, father Altair and mama Alto, and you naturally get their offspring, Mac the Kid!

Mac the Kid is composed of a first edition Macintosh 128K at the top, with a body consisting of other compact Macs of the late 80s and early 90s and feet composed of early 90s Mac towers. Around his middle is a Hyperdriven mac T-shirt. Another artifact case contains some representative documents like early People's Computer newsletter and Byte magazines, an Alto Mouse, Jef Raskin's joystick for the Apple II, cassette and diskette software etc etc. On the wall to the left is a video of yours truly, Dr. Bruce Damer, giving a tour of the DigiBarn. And on the right is an interactive display that permitted people to leave some very interesting post-it notes comments. Bravo SC MAH!

My personal statement for the "Mac the Kid & Family" exhibit was posted as follows:

“No invention since the birth of language has impacted Human existence more than the computer. Yet we are only thirty years into the digital epoch so we can still ask ‘where did this all come from?’ and receive answers from real, living people.

The DigiBarn Computer Museum is a passionate project of mine in which I am attempting to knit together the story of the birth of personal computing and the interconnected digital lifestyle using actual working artifacts and personal stories of the designers, engineers, marketeers, and users of these Promethean machines.”

Dr. Bruce Damer
Creator and Curator, DigiBarn Computer Museum

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Original Exhibit Design

See Also:

The DigiBarn's World of Xerox (including the Alto)

The DigiBarn's birthday and pages on the Homebrew Computer Club and the Altair 8800

Apple artifacts at the DigiBarn