page_title: The Computer Museum, Boston
section_title: The Walk-Through Computer (1990, 1995)
hierarchical_section_title: The Computer Museum, Boston / Permanent exhibitions / The Walk-Through Computer (1990, 1995)
caption_attribution_description: English: Giant working trackball used to control the World Traveler software
context_page_description: The Computer Museum was a Boston, Massachusetts, museum that opened in 1979 and operated in three different locations until 1999. It was once referred to as TCM and is sometimes called the Boston Computer Museum. When the Museum closed in 2000, much of its collection was sent to the Computer History Museum in California.
context_section_description: A two-story-high model of a personal computer, simulated to be working interactively. 
  The purpose of the exhibit was to show the anatomy of a computer and to explain how the various parts work and communicate with each other. Before entering the computer's chassis, visitors could roll a giant trackball to play "World Traveller" on the giant screen.  Wall-sized graphics by David Macaulay and interactive exhibits explained how all kinds of information, from text, graphics, video, music, as well as computer programs can be represented as 1's and 0's. Inside the giant chassis, visitors walked between a wall-sized graphics card and memory card to the microprocessor, upon which a projected electron microscope imagery of a CPU's circuits in operation appeared.  Further on, a RAM set of modules plugged into the motherboard included reveals showing electron microsope imagery of memory circuits,  Peering into a mini-van sized hard drive, visitors could see read/write heads position themselves on either side of rotating platters. Richard Fowler was recruited from The Science Museum, London/Bradford, as exhibit designer.  The exhibit garnered international publicity and more than doubled visitor traffic to the museum.
caption: Giant working trackball used to control the World Traveler software
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