Huge `Information Age' Exhibit Draws Crowds, And Criticism, To Smithsonian

WASHINGTON - The Smithsonian Institution is drawing heavy crowds - and stirring some controversy - with a huge new exhibit that traces the information revolution from Samuel Morse's first telegraph to an arcade of beeping computer screens.

Criticism of the ``Information Age'' show, which recently opened for a permanent engagement at the National Museum of American History, stems partly from the decision to let corporate sponsors pick up the $10 million tab for the largest and perhaps the most expensive exhibition in Smithsonian history.

Museum director Roger Kennedy insisted that the show's content was not influenced in any way by IBM, AT&T, Unysis, Xerox and other giants that completely bankrolled the exhibit.

He said the Smithsonian was forced to rely on private support because congressional budget cuts had left his museum without federal money to mount major new exhibitions.

His boss, Secretary of the Smithsonian Robert McC. Adams, hinted at some misgivings over another aspect of the exhibition, which climaxes with a daunting display of high-tech wizardry.

Adams said ``we need to do better'' in dealing with the impact of computer technology on human beings, such as the potential for invasion of privacy, the hacker problem and the boredom of sitting all day at a word processor.

Even so, the exhibition is a undeniably a dazzler.

Five years in the making, it boasts 700 artifacts and many graphics in 14,000 square feet of gallery space, wired with more than 10 miles of extra cable.

The show includes 78 computers capable of handling a billion instructions every second and storing the equivalent of a million typewritten pages of information. There are 43 video monitors, 52 laser videodisc players, 20 ``touch screen'' displays and 24 bar-code scanners - enough to equip checkout counters at a couple of supermarkets.

Visitors begin with a view of Morse's original telegraph transmitter, conceived in 1832, and exit through a state-of-the-art chamber of wonders where the sound of Billy Taylor's jazz piano can be transformed into a cathedral choir at the touch of a button.

In between, the exhibit includes a working, 2-ton robot once used to weld automobile bodies at a General Motors plant in Delaware, the R2-D2 and C3PO robots of ``Star Wars'' fame and the first public display of the long-secret mechanical computers that enabled the Allies to decipher the Germans' vaunted Enigma radio code in World War II.

Along the way, there is a 1930s radio studio, a newsreel theater, early phonograph records and the television camera used to broadcast the historic Kennedy-Nixon presidential debate in 1960.

Smithsonian officials predicted that the ``Information Age'' will serve as a future model for other museums because of its unprecedented opportunities for hands-on visitor participation at computerized displays.

Viewers can tap out the international distress signal at a re-creation of the Titanic's radio room, talk over the same telephone wire used by Alexander Graham Bell, punch in their demographic profiles to retrieve census data and analyze their own fingerprints using the FBI computer.

``The movement, processing and storage of huge and rapidly growing amounts of information is not something impersonal - out there,'' Adams said. ``The Information Age is probably the driving force in what has already differentiated us sharply from our grandparents.''