The British Library has a wonderful – well what is it? An exhibition? a memorial? – something in a room with posters on the wall with slogans such as ‘Boredom is Counter-Revolutionary’ and ‘Wanted Hip Cops’ and pictures of Martin Luther King; 1968 ‘A Year of Revolution’; a screen with a picture of a tank on the streets of Prague; and blond haired students with long foppish hair and sneakers and drain pipe trousers throwing petrol bombs at it. These teenagers look like their contemporaries forty years later.

There’s a sound archive. You can listen to music, the Christmas message from Apollo 8 broadcast from space on the 24th December, students talking about the riots in Paris and fighting back against Russian imperialism (if you think Russia in 1968 had anything to do with socialism, look away now…).

What is so wonderful about this whole experience is that it’s such a good example of general public utility computing. You don’t need a computer to use it or access to the internet – you just come in to this room, sit down, put the headphones on and the sights and sounds of a whole year are there. And isn’t a strange sensation how music has a context? That listening to Voodoo Child (slight return) and Lazy Sunday and Street Fighting Man surrounded by pictures of anti-war protestors and a woman standing in front of armed police, and the wonderful Black Power salute at the Olympics…really does make the spine tingle….it contextualises the history.

And more; this whole set up breaks down the barrier between personal and private. Why should culture be privatised through the use of copyright and controls? This set up is a good model for how computers, culture and content could be brought together, and how it could all be accessed. In public, for free and for all.

I wonder what the Microsoft alternative might be?