DBZ visits Radical Computing at the National Communication Museum
Ye Olde Telstra phone booth at the MCM
This week Team DBZ was in Melbourne, and we traded our usual screens for some much older ones.
We spent the afternoon at Radical Computing at the National Communication Museum and didn’t want to leave. Most museums ask you not to touch anything. Here you can touch almost everything, so we did. We clacked away on vintage keyboards, wrestled with rotary dials, and remembered how much patience computing used to take. It was also a lot of fun.
The real takeaway hit us on the way out. Every app, every cloud service we use and every line of code we write stands on decades of bold, slightly wonky experiments. Someone had to build the clunky version before anyone could build the sleek one, and progress in tech has rarely been neat. It comes from trying things, getting them a bit wrong, and trying again.
Slowing down for an afternoon made us appreciate how far things have come. It also left us wondering which of today’s wonky experiments will become tomorrow’s foundations.
If you’re in Melbourne, it’s well worth a visit. Thank you to the National Communication Museum for having us! 😄