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Computer History Museum
nickynicky9doors writes: "New Scientist has an interview with computer historian Michael Williams. Mr. Williams has undertaken to set up a world class computer museum. My favourite was always the Cray 2 which used artificial human blood plasma as a coolant, but the article talks of the 1965 HoneyWell kitchen computer which was built for the Neiman Marcus department store. At a cost of $10,500 it came with 2 programming manuals and a cookbook. Garbage In was by way of flickering binary switches and Garbage Out was by a row of blinking lights. There's more at www.computerhistory.org."
There's a Computer Museum in Boston, MA, on Congress Street by the Children's Museum and Boston Tea Party Ship & Museum. I believe it was founded in 1982. ...there's a possibility it went out of busines recently. It doesn't have a website that I can find, but Yahoo! Yellow Pages has a listing for it
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
My favourite was always the Cray 2 which used artificial human blood plasma as a coolant....
Oh, man, do I even need to take the time to correct this?
The Cray 2, like several successors including the C90 and T90, used liquid fluorocarbon as a coolant. This is true.
To say that liquid fluorocarbon is artificial blood plasma is simply false. There are several commercial products that can be used as blood substitutes-- such as Oxycyte-- but these are oxygen-carrying perfluorocarbon (PFC) emulsions. These products are about as similar to the liquid coolant used in the Cray 2 as scrambled eggs are to mayonnaise.
The coolants used in the various Crays, plus lots of other electronic systems, were all pure perfluorocarbon liquids, like Fluorinert, which is a commercial product produced and sold by 3M. They're good choices for immersion cooling because they're chemically inert. Ironically, most of them (like FC-87, fer instance) have boiling points well below that of water; FC-87's is around 30C. They're useful anyway because they're dense and have specific heats about four times less than water's.
The various artificial blood products, though, are PFC emulsions, in which microscopic droplets of PFC are suspended in a saline solution. These liquids can be used because gases like oxygen and CO2 are highly soluble in PFC. Since the droplets of PFC are about 70 times smaller than red blood cells, it's very easy for them to act like RBCs in the blood stream for gas transfer.
The fact that Cray's are liquid cooled is neat enough without messing it up with misinformation.
I couldn't wait 'til Monday.
Here's the link
Thanks for pointing it out - it might come in handy.
Writers imply. Readers infer.
Tom Carlson has been running htis place for a few years. Fun stuff, looking around his old systems. http://www.obsoletecomputermuseum.org/
The obsolete Computer Museum!
~Mike
A big enough hammer fixes *anything*
The timeline starts only at 1945. That misses things like Colossus which is a decent candidate for first electronic programmable (UTM) computer.
Prime numbers are exactly what Alan Greenspan says they are -S. Minsky
It's a shame that some of the first 'real' computers, used in WWII to decrypt German communications, were destroyed after the war ended. They were known as Collosus, and there were at least two of them.
Remember "Bring 'em on"? *sigh
These are great books, btw. I've got a copy called "The Secret Guide to Computers" no volume number mentioned, but it is the 14th edition apparently...
The ISBN for it is 0-939151-14-6, but its not printed inside the book anywhere.
Apparently, they're still being printed too the 27th! edition just came out. --http://www.angelfire.com/nh/secret/ [angilfire.com]
These pretzels are making me thirsty.
Take a look at the Vintage Computer Festival. There are a lot of people who are working hard to preserve the history of the computer industry.
Keep in mind that it's also important to show people that what they think is new just might not be.
P.S., You can check out my collection too.
Stupid people will be persecuted to the fullest extent allowed by law.
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.