Browsing the NTT Digital Museum
We cover three telecom topics in this issue -- PHS, ISDN, and callback. If you want to learn still more about Japan's telecommunications history and its multimedia future, though, point your browser at NTT's Web-based Digital Museum.
by John Drake
The NTT Digital Museum (http://museum.nttinfo.ntt.jp/) is dedicated to "teaching the significance of the telecommunication service and the technology behind that service." I'm tempted to term it the site of "everything you always wanted to know about Japanese telecommunications but didn't know enough to ask."
Information is available here in both Japanese and English; you choose which language to use from the home page listed above. The NTT Digital Museum has enough information and variety that both the casual browser and the telecom aficionado will find something of interest. I have to offer one caution, though: I've accessed this graphics-intensive site at least a dozen times, and it is consistently the slowest I've ever browsed. Whether from home at night with a 28.8K modem or via our office ISDN Internet connection by day, I've often waited 5 minutes or more for some pages to load, and more than once have become impatient and aborted the download process. I hope that, by the time this article is published, the access situation will have improved.
The NTT Digital Museum uses a museum building metaphor to array its information. Thus, the 1st floor is the "entrance lobby," where you will find pointers to general information, a museum guide, a chronology of Japan's telegraphy and telephony, and a "telephone cult quiz." Go to the basement (B1F) and you'll find the "communication studio," with its interactive talk space, NTT communication theater, and telephone card gallery (for those who collect NTT phone cards rather than buying them from suspicious-looking gaijin in Ueno Park).
The theme of the Digital Museum's 2nd floor is "telecommunications history." Specifically, it covers telephone sets and services, pay phones, network services, mobile communications, and image/data communications. The 3rd floor explains several "hows": how telephones connect, how a telephone set works, how an exchange system works, and how a transmission line works. The 4th floor, meanwhile, focuses on "future telecommunications and multimedia." It explains working with multimedia, describes the Joint Experiments on Multimedia, and introduces several emerging technologies, such as ECN (the electronic commerce network), PMC (personal multimedia communication), CD-ROM key service, and Paseo (an intelligent agent).
From the initial home page, you can enter the museum lobby either directly or via a scenic garden, or take a VRML 3-dimensional tour. (Unless access speeds have picked up by the time you read this, don't even consider the latter two routes.) If you have a specific topic of interest, within the NTT Digital Museum you'll find a search engine.
If you're interested in learning more about the Japan's telecommunications history and future, the NTT Digital Museum is a "must visit" site.
