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."

Comments

The Computer Museum

[ChristianBaekkelund]

I still miss the Computer Museum. :(

Memorabilia

[Evanrude]

This will be a good educational tool and also serve as a way for us younger geeks to take a look at the way things used to be a few decades ago. Very cool idea.

sigh

[Bastian]

Looking at this stuff, most of which was created before I was born, I can't help but feel a twinge of remorse. It seems the Golden Age of computer geekdom died with the Information Age.

Things were really hopping in computers a few decades ago. The high-level-laguage, GUI's, timesharing systems, networking. . . it was all new and exciting. It seems, though, that the wave has broken. Nothing new seems to have happened since the early '90's, when the WWW was first envisioned.

I catch myself sitting in classes with other CS majors who have never really learned DOS and are awed by and afraid of OpenGL and thinking back to high school when I spent my free time programming cute little VGA hacks in x86 assembly language and can't help but feel a twinge of superiority based on some unfounded feeling that I have touched the machine itself and they have not.

Then I go to a museum like this, take a look at what my elders were working on, and realize that I am the small fish. The magi have played their part, and I have a feeling of dread that the field has more or less reached its plateau point.

Re:sigh

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

The Magi are still there, the results of their creations are just physically smaller. The kind of engineering that goes into the high-end boxes from all the major vendors, and the botique ones too, today is on par with what went into the high-end boxes of yesteryear.