Digitized Concepts

Earlier this week, on July 20, 2009, we celebrated the 40th anniversary of the first human landing on the moon. To commemorate this event the Google code blog published transcriptions of the original Command Module and Lunar Module source codes.

Thus 40 years after Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin first walked on the moon I found myself browsing the Apollo 11 source code and downloading the open source emulator of its computer. I was in awe; it was a truly humbling experience. Those lines of carefully crafted assembly instructions felt like precious artifacts, and I was grateful to the people who made my experience possible.

And then it hit me: the web sites hosting the Virtual AGC project and the Apollo 11 source code were museums. Wikipedia confirmed this observation:

A museum is a "permanent institution in the service of society and of its development, open to the public, which acquires, conserves, researches, communicates and exhibits the tangible and intangible heritage of humanity and its environment, for the purposes of education, study, and enjoyment", as defined by the International Council of Museums.

Indeed, it was all there: conservation, communication, heritage... And the sites are open to the public like no museum has been before.

Yup, these were museums alright, of the digital age kind. But museums of what? Of Apollo 11? Of moon exploration? Perhaps. More than anything, however, these sites felt like museums of the human spirit.

Zzzzz...