Most people associate the digital revolution with the West Coast, and it's easy to see why. Many of today's biggest tech companies, from Apple to Microsoft to Google, all got their start out West. However, none of them would exist today without the groundwork laid decades before in New York.
"All these kinds of inventions and businesses are based on a lot of things coming together in one place, and New York was a place where all these things had already come together in terms of finances, commerce, culture, communications and just physically," the New-York Historical Society's chief curator Stephen Edidin told Tech Times. "This was an island where people sort of met each other, integrated or cross-pollinated their ideas just by being in this physical locale."
The New-York Historical Society will explore the Big Apple's place in the development of computers and today's tech titans in an upcoming exhibition titled "Silicon City: Computer History Made in New York" opening Nov. 13 and running through April 17, 2016. With more than 180 artifacts and hands-on displays, the exhibition chronicles the computer-related achievements in the New York region from the late 1800s through the 1980s and where the city stands in the industry today.
But before this timeline guides visitors through the exhibition, they're first transported back to the latter half of the 20th century to the 1964 New York World's Fair. The New-York Historical Society's exhibition will recreate the egg-shaped IBM pavilion designed by Eero Saarinen and feature parts of the multimedia experience "Think" by Charles and Ray Eames that played to World's Fair visitors.
With the rise of the personal computer in the early 1980s, the West quickly became the headquarters for the American computer industry. However, New York has slowly started to rise as a tech hub in the country once again, a topic that the final part of the exhibition explores. Startups are now setting up shop in all five boroughs, major tech companies like Google have New York outposts, and the future completion of the Cornell Tech campus, which is scheduled to open in 2017, could bring computing back to the city that never sleeps in a major way, Edidin said.
"What they're reacting to is the same idea that initially made New York such a powerful community. It's a sort of finite space in which people tend to interact just because they have to, and so you have these constant meetings taking place physically as well as virtually in a way that you can't have in sort of the wide-open spaces of California, let's say," Edidin said. "So that is the point here, that there was a constant going to a peak and a bit of an ebb and a flow, and now we're reaching sort of critical mass again."
It's up to you, New York.
