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IV

Hall IV

We changed the world

From the archivist

Some inventions did not add a thing to the world; they changed how everything else moved. A printed page, a message between two machines. This hall keeps the turning points, and asks what they cost.

10 fragments in this hall · Asia 5 · Europe 3 · Americas 2

A tall black basalt stele, rounded at the top, standing in a pale gallery. In the relief at its summit a bearded king stands with one hand raised before a seated god who holds out a rod and a ring; below, the whole polished shaft is covered in close columns of tiny cuneiform signs.

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1792 to 1750 BCE

The Code of Hammurabi

Made in present-day Iraq; found at Susa (Shush), Iran; now in the Louvre, Paris · Asia

The opening of a paper scroll printed in black ink: on the right, a woodcut of the Buddha seated behind an altar table under a canopy, surrounded by monks, guardian figures and a lion, with an elderly disciple kneeling at the lower left; on the left, columns of Chinese characters.

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868 CE

The Diamond Sutra of 868

Mogao Caves, Dunhuang, Gansu, China · Asia

An old book of yellowed paper lying open in a glass case, its two pages printed in columns of black Chinese characters inside thin ruled frames, some characters slightly uneven in size and inking, with small red marks added by hand beside the text.

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1377 CE

The Jikji

Cheongju, North Chungcheong, Republic of Korea; the book is in Paris · Asia

A large open book on a clear display stand in a dim library room: two pages of dense black Latin type set in two columns each, with a red and blue initial and a few red headings, the thick paper edges and leather binding catching the light.

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c. 1455 CE

The Gutenberg Bible

Mainz, Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany · Europe

Seen across a river on a clear spring day, the ruin of a brick and stone building with empty window openings and broken upper walls, crowned by the bare steel ribs of a dome; green trees and a modern office block stand behind, and people walk along the embankment in front.

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1945

The Hiroshima Peace Memorial (Genbaku Dome)

Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, Hiroshima, Japan · Asia

A black and white studio portrait of Alan Turing in 1951: a man in his late thirties with dark, neatly parted hair, in a tweed jacket, white shirt and dark tie, turned slightly to the left and looking past the camera with a faint smile.

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1950

"Computing Machinery and Intelligence" (Turing, 1950)

Manchester, United Kingdom · Europe

A black and white diagram titled ARPANET Logical Map, March 1977: dozens of named sites across the United States, such as UCLA, SRI, MIT, Harvard and the Pentagon, joined by straight lines, each with boxes listing its computers, and wavy lines marking satellite circuits to Hawaii and to Norway.

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1969 to 1990

A map of a new network: ARPANET

Los Angeles, California, United States · Americas

A black NeXT cube computer in a glass display case beside its monitor and keyboard; a white label on the cube reads, in red handwriting, This machine is a server, DO NOT POWER IT DOWN; in front lie an open book and a printed sheet with a hand drawn diagram.

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1990 to 1993

The first web server

Meyrin, Canton of Geneva, Switzerland · Europe

A tall black computer cabinet in two panels on a dark blue plinth in a museum hall, marked IBM at the top left and RS/6000 SP at the top right, with a small label in front; behind it, a panel with a drawing of a hand pressing an off switch, and to the right a screen showing a chess piece.

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1997

Deep Blue and Kasparov

Equitable Center, 787 Seventh Avenue, New York, United States · Americas

Diagram of a finished Go game on a 19 by 19 wooden-coloured grid, black and white stones each numbered in the order they were played, from 1 to 211; the caption reads Lee Sedol (W) vs AlphaGo (B), Game 2. Black stone 37 sits alone on the right side, on the fifth line from the edge.

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2016

AlphaGo and Lee Sedol

Seoul, Republic of Korea · Asia