How far we've come: Pokemon exhibit gives glimpse of computing history

Syd Bolton can't help but chuckle when he's trying to explain the seemingly monolithic computers of yesterday to a group of today's kids.

Take the decades-old 70s clunker he recovered from the Sleeman Brewery (which sadly, didn't contain any beer recipes). It has a 125-megabyte hard drive that's the size of a pizza box — good for maybe about 25 songs on their iPod or iPhone, he tells the kids.

"And they're like, 'that sucks' – and I'm like, 'yes, yes it does,'" he said with a laugh.

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On Saturday, Bolton will showcase just how far we have come in the last 40 years of computing at the Personal Computer Museum in Brantford, which is hosting a Pokemon exhibit (and hosting a Pokestop).

In some ways, Bolton, who is the museum's founder and curator, is capitalizing on the pocket monster madness sweeping the world. Pokemon Go's sphere of influence is inescapable, and it's been listed as the biggest mobile game in U.S. history.

Maybe this way, people can get a bit of an understand about computing's evolution.- Syd Bolton, Brantford Personal Museum founder and curator

It's not technically available in Canada yet, but plenty of people are already circumventing their smartphone's location settings to get in on the action.

But what Bolton is offering at the museum is invaluable — a look at the massive strides that have been made in computing in the last 40 years, and using Pokemon as the hook.

Augmented reality to binary only

Yes, Saturday's one-day only exhibit will showcase Pokemon's roots, back to the mid-90s Nintendo efforts that popularised the brand in North America.

No doubt kids will get a kick out of the Game Boy's 8-bit graphics compared to the hyper-realistic versions of the characters they see in today's games.

But the real marvel here is comparing the museum's massive collection of vintage computers to the mobile game that is now so widespread. Pokemon Go uses what's called "augmented reality" — using your smartphone camera to make it appear that the game's characters are in the world around you.

Compare that to the museum's oldest computer — a 1975 IMSAI, which was a kit computer that you could put together yourself for $600, or buy for $930 assembled. The adjusted price today, with inflation? Almost $2,700.

In many ways, it doesn't register as a computer. It's a box with switches and glowing HAL9000 eyes that's essentially a glorified calculator. It didn't come with a keyboard or screen, and could only handle math calculations inputted in binary code.

By contrast, today's kids are walking around with a smartphone that can do almost anything, and is more powerful than all the computers in the museum put together.

"Look at what we've done in the last 40 years. It's amazing," Bolton said.

Technology now 'easily disposable'

And that's why he started the museum back in 2005. "We're going through all these things so quickly — sometime, people are going to want to look back," he said.

But we live in a society that's much more prone to replacing things over fixing them. There used to be TV repair shops on every other street. Now, you'd be hard pressed to find them in many cities. Why bother, when you can just buy another TV for a couple hundred bucks?

It's a society where things become so easily obsolete that scraps of the past are quickly lost.

"We've become so easily disposable about everything," Bolton said.

"Maybe this way, people can get a bit of an understanding about computing's evolution."

The Brantford Personal Computer Museum's Pokemon exhibit runs one day only on Saturday, July 16 from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at 13 Alma Street in Brantford. Admission is by donation.

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