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• Grace Hopper : Girl Genius of Vassar
• Lt. Hopper of the U.S. Navy
• Grace Hopper and the Mystery of the Hollerith Code
• Grace Hopper Tames the MARK I
• Grace Hopper Defeats the NAZIs
• Grace Hopper vs the Pernicious Moth
• Grace Hopper Unravells Sputnik
• Grace Hopper vs the Commie Russians
• Grace Hopper Unleashes the Scourage of COBOL
• Grace Hopper Arm-Wrestles Hyman Rickover
• Cmdr. Grace Hopper : Recalled to Duty (special double issue)
• Cmdr. Grace Hopper Defeats the Commie Russians
• Grace Hopper CyberGrrrrrl

• And remember, (+1, Funnay) does nothing for karma!

Here are several other great Apple history resources.

Sites:

• www.apple-history.com is one of the best Internet sources, with information on every computer Apple ever produced
• apple.computerhistory.org has year-by-year info on Apple with some cool, hard-to-find pictures

Books:

• The Second Coming of Steve Jobs by Alan Deutschman
• Apple Confidential 2.0: The Definitive History of the World's Most Colorful Company by Owen W. Linzmayer
• Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer That Changed Everything by Steven Levy

Other:

• Pirates of Silicon Valley is a largely inaccurate but quite enjoyable movie about Apple's beginnings =)

Here's the real robot hall of fame, the Computer History Museum's robot collection. Many of the famous ones are there, including the Hopkins Beast and Shakey. They used to be on public display in Boston, but now they're in Mountain View, California. The Computer History Museum now has a new building, and is gradually setting up exhibits. Tours are available.

Theres no questioning Apple's unique place in the personal computer industry or their history of missed opportunities. It reads like a grocery list. Apple had a full 2-3 year head start on the IBM PC as I recall, there was nobody else in their league. As you stated the problem with Apple is simply their refusal for so long to open their architecture and cross lisence their hardware. Instead of IBM PC compatibles you would have had a zillion Apple compatibles to choose from. I remember a few A2 compatibles but they were mostly bit players and overall this particular strategy was never followed through on. Fact of the matter is Apple could've been both IBM (in their dominance of desktop hardware) and Microsoft (in their dominance of desktop software) but they blew it. The Apple timeline retrospective gives some really unique viewpoints on the early days and corporate culture at Apple: http://apple.computerhistory.org/stories/

Apple was founded by a couple of guys who believed in the power of computing to transform education. They put a lot of emphasis in the education market in the early days of Apple because it was something they were both passionate about, and because they believed it was a good way to grow the company. You could in fact argue that the early emphasis on the education market was counterproductive, in that it sapped their ability to compete in the corporate world.

Microsoft only got seriously involved in education market once they'd already conquered the corporate market. In the mean time, they let PC vendors do the work of beating Apple in education.

Doesn't the current "What do you see?" marketing campaign from Microsoft strike you as absurdly self-serving? Apple's long history in the education market has been riddled with mistakes and ups and downs, but the company has never been as mercenary about education as Microsoft.

The Computer Museum in Boston closed several years ago, but apparently their hardware went to the Computer History Museum.

Wasn't this a super-fancy SGI building not long ago? How the mighty have fallen.

Links should be two and four respectively.

Great site, guys! Wish I was in the US so I could come and visit!

Links should be two and four respectively.

Great site, guys! Wish I was in the US so I could come and visit!

In order to keep it from getting more fingerprints and dirt, and to remove the gumming up tape that held it up, the diagram was taken off the side of the IMP where it lived in the moffett warehouse.

That diagram was of over 20 nodes and generated by a plotter, not hand drawn.. the cooler diagrams are of the first two and four nodes, and those are handwritten.

A brief internet history on the site covers these and more.

In order to keep it from getting more fingerprints and dirt, and to remove the gumming up tape that held it up, the diagram was taken off the side of the IMP where it lived in the moffett warehouse.

That diagram was of over 20 nodes and generated by a plotter, not hand drawn.. the cooler diagrams are of the first two and four nodes, and those are handwritten.

A brief internet history on the site covers these and more.

In order to keep it from getting more fingerprints and dirt, and to remove the gumming up tape that held it up, the diagram was taken off the side of the IMP where it lived in the moffett warehouse.

That diagram was of over 20 nodes and generated by a plotter, not hand drawn.. the cooler diagrams are of the first two and four nodes, and those are handwritten.

A brief internet history on the site covers these and more.

Woo hoo! My TRS-80 isn't listed... my wife will *love* the closet space that will free up.

Oh, shoot, the page goes on to say "nothing mass-produced unless it has a low serial number" -- and they're talking about low as in less-than-or-equal-to 000030 or so. I'll have to take a look...

On the other hand, even if they would take my TRS-80, I don't think I could part with it. Even though my brilliant assembly-language terminal program (for my 300-baud modem with toggle switch for "answer-off-originate") has likely turned into just so much oxide on a decaying cassette tape.

On a side note... I was surfing the site when all of a sudden, it stopped responding. Sure enough, the Slashdot story had gone live.

Slashdot subscription: five bucks
Being able to visit a feature site before it's Slashdotted to death: Priceless

As a geek, I'd co to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California - The Head Curator, Michael Williams is an amazing person and has millions of interesting stories - He used to teach a computer history course at my university that everyone raved about (heh, he tought me COBOL in my second year).

• National Museum of American History: Everything from a Morse's original telegraphs, Bell's original telephones, an Enigma, an ENIAC, a Hollorith Tabulating Machine, to a Trash-80 in the Information Age Exhibit located in the lower level
• Air and Space: The Wright Brother's Flyer, the Spirit of St Louis, the X-1, and if you visit after Decemeber of 2003, head out to Dulles Airport to see Udvar Hazy Center which will have even more aircraft including a SR-71, the Enola Gay, and the original space shuttle Enterprise.

In Boston, check out the Computer History Museum

In Chicago

• the Museum of Science and Industry is worth a visit.
• Plus there are plenty of Frank LLoyd Wright buildings to visit.

In the Bay Area there is

• the The Tech Museum in San Jose which is okay but if you plan far enough in advance (reservations are required)
• the Computer Museum History Center in Mountain View is probably the best collection of computers since the 50's.
• Intel has a museum at it's San Jose campus.
• Also dont miss a visit to Weird Stuff in Sunnyvale.

• National Museum of American History: Everything from a Morse's original telegraphs, Bell's original telephones, an Enigma, an ENIAC, a Hollorith Tabulating Machine, to a Trash-80 in the Information Age Exhibit located in the lower level
• Air and Space: The Wright Brother's Flyer, the Spirit of St Louis, the X-1, and if you visit after Decemeber of 2003, head out to Dulles Airport to see Udvar Hazy Center which will have even more aircraft including a SR-71, the Enola Gay, and the original space shuttle Enterprise.

In Boston, check out the Computer History Museum

In Chicago

• the Museum of Science and Industry is worth a visit.
• Plus there are plenty of Frank LLoyd Wright buildings to visit.

In the Bay Area there is

• the The Tech Museum in San Jose which is okay but if you plan far enough in advance (reservations are required)
• the Computer Museum History Center in Mountain View is probably the best collection of computers since the 50's.
• Intel has a museum at it's San Jose campus.
• Also dont miss a visit to Weird Stuff in Sunnyvale.

If you're interested in the history of computers, this is the place to visit.
Check out their website www.computerhistory.org.
They have some amazing collection of *old* computers...

1. In Boston, The Museum of Science home page is pretty good way to spend a day or half day. I mention it only 'cause I live there.

2. Also, if you're into that kinda thing, the Monster Garage vehicles are on semi-tour, you can check when and where they're being displayed here

3. The Computer History Museum here . Never been, but they used to have a part of it here in Boston.
...and if you do a blog with pictures, let us know where.

See an Enigma machine, a chunk of ENIAC, the PDP-1 on which SpaceWar was invented, multiple Cray supercomputers, and an Apple I, all in one day.

Unlike most "museums", which are geared to a young or general audience (you know what I'm talking about, big displays that talk about how binary means "made of ones and zeroes" and such), this is a museum built by, and for, geeks. The tour guides actually know what they're talking about, having worked on half the stuff in the collection.

A glance at their Lecture list should give you an idea of the caliber of the museum and its collection.

Last time I was there, the cost of admission was "whatever you wanted to donate". So even if you're traveling on a budget, You Have No Excuse For Not Seeing This Before You Die.

See an Enigma machine, a chunk of ENIAC, the PDP-1 on which SpaceWar was invented, multiple Cray supercomputers, and an Apple I, all in one day.

Unlike most "museums", which are geared to a young or general audience (you know what I'm talking about, big displays that talk about how binary means "made of ones and zeroes" and such), this is a museum built by, and for, geeks. The tour guides actually know what they're talking about, having worked on half the stuff in the collection.

A glance at their Lecture list should give you an idea of the caliber of the museum and its collection.

Last time I was there, the cost of admission was "whatever you wanted to donate". So even if you're traveling on a budget, You Have No Excuse For Not Seeing This Before You Die.

So, your dead grandmother worked on the ENIAC Project, or perhaps the MANIAC project given your complete lack of clue as to why the files might be misnamed, or how incomplete files get there.

Some would say God invented the laptop. I say evolution.

Either way I'm not sure Apple invented the Notebook.

Could you provide a Link

Seriously, if there are significant machines in the collection (and there certainly appear to be), and the alternative is the dumpster (shudder!), the Aussie museum should contact them ASAP and see what can be arranged.

1. Fifty-Year-Old Computer Being Restored

On Monday November 22, @10:50PM with 116 comments

James Green directs us to "a Sunday Age (Melborne) article which describes the discovery of a 52 year old computer found in a dusty warehouse weighing in at...

I guess Geek.Com is behind ;-)

2. The first Transistor computer, TX-0, was restored to demonstratable condition in the 1980's by The Computer Museum. Yes it worked again, No question; as an original member and early volunteer of TCM (before the first tmove), I was there, and saw it run.

TCM was once of Boston, then of Marlboro, now of SilliValley. See the TCM Project Description and the Alumni page. It was built in 1957, so would be only 45 years old. I'm not sure what happened to it when DEC sold the building, or John McKenzie, who got it to work again. Shag Graetz's classic Creative Computing article on PDP-1 SpaceWar includes it's TX-0 predecessor. (and French translation) The TMRC pages include TX-0 history as well. See also Levy/Hackers

-- bill / n1vux

Also, directly in the shadow of a huge airship hangar at Moffett Field, is the Computer History Museum.

Very geek-friendly, geared towards a technical audience, and not at all dumbed-down like the "kid-friendly" computer sections in "normal" museums.

The site says open Wednesday/Friday at 1300h, and the First and Third Saturdays of each month at 1300 and 1400h. Admittance to Moffet Field requires that you show driver's licence or other photo ID, but I don't think you have to be a US citizen.

Upcoming lectures include Steve Wozniak on December 10th. (woot!)

Also, directly in the shadow of a huge airship hangar at Moffett Field, is the Computer History Museum.

Very geek-friendly, geared towards a technical audience, and not at all dumbed-down like the "kid-friendly" computer sections in "normal" museums.

The site says open Wednesday/Friday at 1300h, and the First and Third Saturdays of each month at 1300 and 1400h. Admittance to Moffet Field requires that you show driver's licence or other photo ID, but I don't think you have to be a US citizen.

Upcoming lectures include Steve Wozniak on December 10th. (woot!)

I visited them recently, and it is wonderful to see all these PDPs restored. I havent seen a PDP-1 before! I suggest computer history museum in silicon valley for you all. Check out their website.

http://www.computerhistory.org/

The Itanium relies heavily on exceedingly good compilers that will perform for the IA64 the same level of optimization that regular, on-the-fly predictive optimization do in RISC chips.

He recognized that an appropriately defined set of machine instructions, program controls, and programs produced by a compiler--carefully designed to exploit the instruction set--could realize a very high performance processor with relatively few circuits.

I agree. The Computer Museum at Moffit Feild is incredible. Tours are by appt only and are well worth the effort. Several Crays, an Enigma, portions of an Apollo guidance computer, Altairs, Apples, tons of PCs, bunches of mainframes, a Hollerith tabulating machine, and the largest collection of adding machines anywhere.

Also the "information age" exhibit at the Smithsoneon is a good one as well. It used to be in the basement of the American History museum and included part of an Eniac, a Hollerith, and quite a few other historical machines.

(It's been discussed in a previous /. thread, I know)

In 1999, the late and lamented Boston Computer Museum closed its doors and moved organizationally to the Museum of Science, while its artifacts moved to The Computer Museum History Center in Moffett Field, California.

Here's a last-gasp look at its virtual existance, thanks to archive.org.

For those interested you should go check out The Computer Museum History Center (I find the timeline especially interesting). I stumbled upon it when I visited the NASA Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, California. Although the guys there were in a meeting they were kind enough to hand us three issues of Core magasine publication as well as giving us a quick look-see around the premises.

For those interested you should go check out The Computer Museum History Center (I find the timeline especially interesting). I stumbled upon it when I visited the NASA Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, California. Although the guys there were in a meeting they were kind enough to hand us three issues of Core magasine publication as well as giving us a quick look-see around the premises.

Stuff like this make me happy that I'm still holding onto old boards from some of the systems that my father worked on. I have a board of burned out tubes from ENIAC, a section of hand wired Cray 1A, and Altair 8800, and a whole room full of Tandy, and IBM boxes from the 8080 and 1810 families....

Tell me japan... How long will I have to wait before this becomes worth the shipping charges to get it over there?

New donation guidelines are available here. It sounds like your media qualify, especially if you can find the newsreel stuff that goes along with it.

--Tom

New donation guidelines are available here. It sounds like your media qualify, especially if you can find the newsreel stuff that goes along with it.

--Tom

from http://www.computerhistory.org/timeline/topics/com puters.page

i found "John von Neumann" twice...

is he related to sven Neumann of gimp?

I think my favourite part of the computer museum's website is their inclusion of music performed by an old IBM 1403 printer.

Apparently, some engineers managed to find the right lines of characters to produce printer noise of a known pitch. Feeding in punch cards appropriately, they were able to produce output which would form certain tunes. They have some recordings available for download here.

One interesting exhibit which I believe used to be in the Computer Museum in Boston was the Tinkertoy Computer, built by Danny Hillis (of Thinking Machines Corp.). It was a computer made of tinkertoys, capable of playing tic tac toe. I suppose some slashdot folks will say he should have used Lego blocks...

I couldn't find any photos of it; just a tiny little blurb here. I think A.K. Dewdney's Scientific American column in October 1989 also talked about it. Dewdney also used it as the title of one of his books collecting his columns.

Hey! Where's the flood?????????

Black wingtips, white socks and hairy ankles. Dad?

See details here

Which is really said, since it was a really great place. The huge collection of old stuff they had is now out at moffet field, as seen in at http://www.computerhistory.org

I was said to see that stuff go.

Interesting remark. There are efforts already to preserve computer hardware from ages past (look at the National Museum of American History and the Computer Museum). But I'm not aware of any efforts to preserve computer software. Or at least the software hasn't been given as much emphasis as the hardware. This can be started with the preservation of USENET materials. Other stuff that I can think of: the source code of the original PDP/11 UNIX and Linux. Hopefully, as time goes on, companies will be willing to donate the source code of their obsolete commercial software.

Seems to be like a dumb consoled packed in a fancy phone looking box. There's nothing wrong with that but haven't we had this boxed in many flavours, for decades.

Wait a minute...! Maybe I could put my laptop inside my old blackandwhite TV, replace the display with the TFT screen and call it a Digital TV with a broandband IP connection!

Not an incredibly interesting article unless you are going to be on the West cost next week.

However, I did notice the Computer Museum's list of fellows, or more specifically, individuals of outstanding merit and accomplishment who have contributed to the development of computing.

Some familiar faces are there: Vint Cerf, Dennis Ritchie, Woz... I wonder when Linus will grace this list. Who else is missing?!? Tim Berners-Lee? Bill Gates? Bjourne?

I visited Boston for the first time at the end of last year. I had a few days spare, so the Boston Computer Museum was an obvious visit. Finding that it had been absorbed into the Museum of Science wasn't too bad, but what happened to all the exhibits ? Shipped out to storage in California and "... The Best Software for Kids Gallery(TM), now part of an expanded Cahners ComputerPlace". - Just as you describe, it had been reduced to a trivialised version of MSN.

I've a better computer museum in my own shed 8-(

OK, so the Virtual FishTank is excellent, but that's an exhibit on behaviours, not on computer history.

obkarmawhore: Not quite computers, but immensely cool electrical oddities.

IIRC, the MIT Computing Museum (or whatever it's called) in Boston has some exhibits along these lines. The Dr. Dobb's article mentions that The Computer Museum History Center has a 604 on display, so perhaps they'd put a PIC emulator next to it, which could make for a fun resume item!

Google turned up this page which contains some info on the 604's basic instruction set.

• Startup, by Jerry Kaplan. A 1994 tale about pen-computing venture Go, and how it went through $75MM in capital before burning up -- as told by the CEO (!).
  
  
• aol.com, by Kara Swisher. If you don't want to assign the whole book, the second chapter (about the company's founding by an alcoholic, eccentric, self-destructive entrepreneur) is worth the price of admission alone.
  
  
• Good stuff, but not quite as compelling:
  • Netscape Time, by Jim Clark (with Owen Edwards). A fairly human and not-too-smug account of the company's glory years. (c) 1999, when the stock was still worth something.)
  • The Second Coming of Steve Jobs, by Alan Deutschman. Written with flair and wit. Really about one specific person, though -- doesn't dwell on bigger insights on the industry.
  • High Noon: The Inside Story of Scott McNealy and the Rise of Sun Microsystems, by Karen Southwick. Too adoring. By pure coincidence, I did P.R. work for Sun (after this book was written), and knew some of the folks responsible for making it so... nice.
• Two books by Peter Salus: A Quarter Century of UNIX, and Casting the Net (foreword by Vint Cerf!). Excellent for highly technical audiences, next-to-useless for general audiences. Sorry, Peter. (Random fact: I was friends briefly with his daughter when we were in high school. I believe she still works at Linux Magazine.)

Good luck with the class! --Tom Geller

There's also The Computer Museum History Center, though I'd be careful. I spotted 3 major omissions/mistakes in the first ten minutes of reading the site.

The Computer Museum History Center has a KL-10 model in their collection. The museum is working toward a permanent display building at Moffett Field, but you can see part of the collection now if you go to one of their events.

The Computer Museum History Center has a KL-10 model in their collection. The museum is working toward a permanent display building at Moffett Field, but you can see part of the collection now if you go to one of their events.

I don't think this is the case anymore, at least as far as computer history is concerned. The Computer Museum History Center broke off from The Computer Museum in Boston as early as 1996 or so and moved to a building on Moffett Federal Airfield in Mountain View, California. You can visit, but you need to get clearance to get onto the site.

Website: http://www.computerhistory.org/

Also of interest (and closer to Boston): the Retrocomputing Society of Rhode Island. Their website is here. There are more museums scattered here and there, but I believe these two (and, perhaps, the Smithsonian) are the foremost.

--Tom