Digital Cache: The Evolution of Computers

Once they were huge, the electronic equivalents of Zeus on Mount Olympus, cumbersome, cranky, and commanding constant care. More recently, they have become abstract and ethereal, shrinking into mote-size microprocessors and vanishing into wireless networks yet retaining the power to awe, chasten, and grant blessings. In their seventh decade, electronic computers have morphed again. They are not just tools but objects worthy of contemplation in their own right. And now they have their own museum, a secular temple, if you will, devoted to explaining how and why they came to be.