Raves

Posted on 7 May 2009 at 11:07

 

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I've been exposing myself in public again, and I admit there are now images of me as homo erectus all over the internet.

But please don't be too shocked. I've done it in the name of Queen and country, and I can explain everything. I'm attending a symposium in Paris on the evolution of computers, and my task is to keep the British end up. So a virtual image of me covered in nothing but body hair seems a jolly good way of doing it. Here's why.

The Mus?©e National des Arts et M?©tiers is a palace of learning devoted to science, technology and invention. It used to be an abbey, but they kicked out the monks during the French Revolution and the techies have been running the show ever since. Today it houses the greatest repository of vintage computers in the world, including a couple of 1980s machines I helped drive into commercial oblivion. Which is why I've been invited to Paris, as a living exhibit of British failure in the context of French enterprise.

Among the dazzling displays of computing down the ages, there are several machines crafted by Blaise Pascal in the 1640s. There's even one that looks just like the calculators I remember using in Britain until decimalisation in 1971. I'm starting to enjoy myself, especially as my hostess looks a lot more attractive than she did four glasses ago. She introduces me to the world's first practical robot, still in working condition. It boasts a computer brain programmed by binary code held on punch cards, and was built by Joseph Marie Jacquard in 1801. I had planned to claim Charles Babbage as the father of computing, but I scrap that part of my little speech, seeing as he didn't design his machine until 1822 and we didn't manage to build the thing until 1989.

So where does homo erectus come in? Well, it's my way of demonstrating the speed of computing evolution compared with human evolution. I'm forced to agree with my French hosts that mechanical computers have been around since the 1640s, and electronic computers since the 1940s, and we also agree that the rate of acceleration of computing power outstrips human brain capacity by an ever-increasing factor of squiddlydoodles. Which is why I'm demonstrating the timeline of human evolution, and claiming Charles Darwin as top gun around here, and an Englishman to boot.

Homo erectus, who lived almost two million years ago, was the common ancestor of all us Europeans, and I'm using a brilliant utility on the Open University website that celebrates Darwin's theory of evolution. Go to www.open.ac.uk/darwin and click on Devolve Me. Upload your mugshot for free, then slide the button to travel back through time and meet your own monkey ancestor. My two-million-year-old image looks amazing as I do this, but then my hostess throws a puzzled glance at my prehistoric face and sniffs, "But Monsieur, why do you 'ave Sir Alan Sugar on your screen?" Ooh la la.

Author: Mel Croucher