With the kids on summer holidays, it's time to drag them out of the house and away from their PlayStations for something educational. So how about taking them to the Science Museum in Ueno where they can learn about the history of computers, and then, well, play yet more TV games.

Or if you are a big kid yourself, the museum's new exhibition "TV Games and Digital Science" has enough old-school technology to get the young at heart reminiscing over their first Atari or Apple computer or some original arcade games from their youth.

The story starts in the early 19th century with one of the earliest proto-computers, the "Difference Engine" - a calculating machine designed by the eccentric British inventor Charles Babbage. Powered by the user turning a crank hundreds if not thousands of times for each calculation, this beast weighed nearly three tons and consisted of 4,000 parts. Even so, it featured all the logical components of modern day computers.

By the looks of the next exhibit, things hadn't progressed that much by the 1970s for they were still making computers you would need a team of four to lift. A hard drive the size of a car tire that was used with the supercomputer Illiac IV was capable of storing a whopping 10MB of memory. For comparison, next to this are CD-Rs a fraction of the size from the present day that are capable of storing hundreds of megabytes. The Illiac IV is now considered a failed attempt to create a supercomputer capable of parallel processing - i.e. conducting numerous operations at the same time. It was developed in 1969, and it filled a whole room at NASA from 1972 until its retirement in 1976 when it was superseded by the first true supercomputer, the Cray-1.

Finishing off all the difficult science stuff, I could then get on with what I really came here for - checking out all the cool-looking computers and games.

Representing the more manageable home computing front are the first Apple in its original wooden casing, and the Altair 8800 with its wonderfully primitive (and typically seventies) design, plus dozens of other classic computers.

Through photographic records the exhibition documents a basic computer game from as early as 1958 called "Tennis For Two." Apparently it was fun to play, but even the inventor didn't take it seriously enough to develop its potential. It wasn't until 1962 when Steve Russell at MIT developed "Space Wars" that things started moving on the computer game front, and even then nothing was released commercially for a number of years.

Computers were still large and expensive to run - but every household had a TV. On display here is the "Brown Box" by Ralph Baer, with which basic but functional video games - for example those where players would chase dots across the screen - could be played on a standard TV. Baer developed this over 1966/1967 and it came on the market for Magnavox in 1972 as the Odyssey 1TL200, the original inelegant wooden box replaced by a more futuristic plastic console. It still had such basic graphics that plastic sheets had to be pasted onto the TV screen to keep the viewer's visual interest, but even so, it contained a dozen games and earned the title of the first home video game.

The first ever commercial coin-operated arcade game was released in 1971 by Nutting Associates. Its designer, Nolan Bushnell, followed Baer's work closely but more importantly studied directly under Russell and streamlined the "Space Wars" concept for arcade and bar use. But "Computer Space" was difficult to operate for inebriated bar patrons and it wasn't very popular, even when re-launched in a curved space-age cabinet - one of the best dressed arcade games in this exhibition. The exhibition describes "Computer Space" as a computer game, although it is often referred to, perhaps mistakenly, as a video game or a computerized video game - but don't ask me, all I know is that it looks fabulous and was featured briefly in a seventies sci-fi film, and even in Jaws.

In all only 3,000 units were sold and "Computer Space" was scrapped. Bushnell then formed Atari, (named after the equivalent of "check" in the Japanese board game Go), launching the extremely popular Pong game in 1972, which is well documented here. Based on the idea of "Tennis For Two," Pong was easier to play and soon sold over 100,000 units, paving the way for Atari to become the leading game maker of the seventies and early eighties. One of their most popular games was "Asteroids," which again revived the "Space Wars"/ "Computer Space" template.

The exhibition presents quite an exhaustive range of products from the ensuing game boom, including upright arcade games such as the classic "Space Invaders" from Taito in 1978 and Namco's 1980 original "Puck Man" from Japan - the name was changed to Pacman in the States to avoid tempting kids to change the P to an F.

On the home game front dozens of video and computer games have been collected here. Seeing these all in one place brings home the fact that as game technology itself exploded, the colorful space age designs of the seventies gave way to the streamlined but less beautiful hi-tech grey and black consoles of the nineties and today.

The only drawback with the exhibition for non-Japanese is the absence of English information about the exhibits. Also, the old games that you'd love to get your hands on are strictly look and no touch, except at the end of the exhibition where some game-makers, including Play Station 2 have set up interactive booths for their latest games. But these are definitely for the kids - i.e. the real kids, the ones on summer vacation.