This weekend, Ars staff is checking out the Vintage Computer Festival East (and you probably should, too, if you can). But two weeks ago, I got the chance to take a different trip through the history of computing. Rather than focusing simply on the past, an exhibit at the Bard College Center is tracking the changes in our interactions with computing hardware, from the Commodore to the Kinnect.

The exhibit consists of a mixture of displays. The walls are covered with a mixture of hardware, from early "luggable" portable computers (there's an Osborne 1) through to some of the latest hardware. Mixed in are video screen captures of some key pieces of software: the Xerox Alto OS, Visicalc, PageMaker, and Netscape Navigator. There's also a wall dedicated to music players, cellphones, pagers, and other portable devices.

But the central focus of the display is working versions of some of the hardware that was, in retrospect, revolutionary. The earliest of these is the Commodore 64 which, along with the TRS80 and Apple ][e, was part of what Byte magazine called the "holy trinity" of personal computing. Because it stayed on the market for so long, it's still the single best-selling model of computer in history, with estimates ranging from 12 to 30 million sold. But it was separated by only two years from the introduction of the Apple Mac, which ushered in the era of the GUI.

From there, it took 14 years to the next revolutionary device, one that ushered in mobile computing: the Palm Pilot. The organizer of the exhibit, Kimon Keramidas, said that there were lots of false starts in this time (notably including Apple's Newton), but Palm was the first device of its sort that gained widespread acceptance. Palm's approach—stylus driven and with a simplified character recognition system called Graffiti—managed to survive until the iPhone era arrived, shifting things to touch-based interfaces.

John Timmer

John Timmer

John Timmer

John Timmer

John Timmer

John Timmer

John Timmer

John Timmer

John Timmer

John Timmer

John Timmer

While the iPhone may seem to be the obvious choice for this exhibit, Keramidas said that it was a complicated device, merging music players and phone service. The iPad, by contrast, was a cleaner attempt to bring touch interfaces to a device that was closer to a personal computer, so that's what made it to the exhibit. As with the Commodore/Mac era, innovation was hot on its heels, as Microsoft's work on gesture-based computing was brought to the consumer market by the Kinect nearly simultaneously.

The layout of the exhibit is intended to make it clear that, in between the periods of interface innovation, there were innovations that were based on the interface. So, for example, the modern laptop layout is built to serve a GUI, and software like PageMaker couldn't exist without one. Different colored lines along the walls connect software, mobile, and hardware innovations, but they're separated from the functional computers that highlight the interface changes, which are located in the center of the room. It pays to move back and forth between the two.

The functional devices are meant to be used, which poses a bit of a challenge: as full-fledged computing devices, it's possible for visitors to put them into all sorts of unfortunate states. (Given that the Commodore 64's interface is a full-fledged BASIC interpreter, it would take no time at all for someone to send it into an infinite loop that spews obscenity onto the screen.) So Keramidas and his students worked to figure out ways to distill down the user interface experience into a short, controlled dose. A talented developer, Jonathan Dahan, then translated these into software.

So, for example, Dahan taught himself enough Hypercard to get the Mac to run a simple paint program. And he managed to find a 1990s-vintage Debian distribution that could host the Palm developer tools. The demo software is obviously limited, but does give a decent feel for the possibilities of each interface. To film a demo of DOS3.1, Keramidas used his Mac to run Parallels, which hosted a Windows XP in a virtual machine, which ran a copy of Virtual PC—which finally could boot into DOS.

While the exhibit itself required a few years of organization, the display hardware was relatively inexpensive. Keramidas was able to get working copies of every computer (and a backup of each one that is available for use) for a total of $6,300, all spent on eBay.

The Interface Experience exhibit runs through July 19 if you can make it to New York City to check it out. You can also check out everything that's on display at the interface experience website. And, if you find it compelling, there's an accompanying book that's designed to look like an early user's manual, complete with a metal wire binder and colored tabs for each chapter.