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UVA Computer Science Museum
Cryptographrix writes "Just came across this site, thought slashdot users should check it out, definately worth a read, has everything from the original Osborne portable computer to such memorables as the Altair...supposedly from the UVA staff's personal collection. Even has old (1950's and another board that looks like ESS3, maybe) telephone switching equipment."
Yes, but does it have a giant dinosaur like the Museum of Natural History? On second thought, dust off some of those old computers that may be the size of those brontosauruses!
Older programmers may not want to see the exhibit, Punch Cards, Paper tape, it's about as close to a geek house of horrors you can get...
I can just see a programmer walk up to a dropped pile of punchcards all scattered around... no way to rewrite the program... Now THAT'S a nightmare!
"Oh no, 3 horny women and only 2 condoms...Thank god I read slashdot"
I haven't been to the actual museum, so this is simply an observation about the website.
The grouping in the article is all wrong. It clumps pictures and articles together by manufacturer. This is great for something like a research document, but for a museum it is terrible. By the time the reader gets acquainted with the devices made by Altair, he gets thrown back in time to get acquainted with the Osborne, and so on.
A better system would be to simply line up the pictures and articles in a timeline where each device can be compared to each other device in a logical manner. The reader can get a feel for how computers evolved from large breadboards to the tiny microchips of today.
I have been pwned because my
anything will do....
...that we'd be so happy to see things we never want to have to use again. :-)
-- We live in a world where lemonade is artificial and soap has real lemon.
Just imagine high school science-class field trips laughing at the very system you're using now...
---
Destiny-land.
The happiest blog on earth.
has the original Apple computer complete with "Apple" burned into its wooden case by Woz himself. ;-)
Sure, they also have the Eniac, the original IBM PC, and a WWII Enigma machine displayed there - but who cares about that stuff?
How about Natalie Portman petrified with hot grits down her pants on a Beowulf cluster of those things?
There are no Quadras... where are all the Quadras?
Seriously - nice to see an online museum that ISN'T merely a collection of 80s personal computers. The more information about the common machines from the 50s and 60s the better - 70s boxies are well known relatively...
a grrl & her server
I can't get Linux to install. Goddamit, I feel cheated. I hate running DOS. Any of ya'll know of an OS that'll run on these specs?
Writers imply. Readers infer.
"Hey, my SOL quit working !"
"Well, I guess you're just S.O.L."
That's not an original Osborne-1. It's an updated version. The original used the mainboard as a structural element to support the monitor.
I don't know if I liked mine or hated it. Everything on it was marginal. Then eventually non-operational.
Does it have an Abicus?!?
They were the first true computers!
In college, really poor, need a flatscreen.
Wow, every time I see a punch card I'm simply amazed that people used to do anything useful with them.. I find punch cards more amazing that any new technology.
I tried to write a program using punch cards once, but instead of a nice sort routine, I accidentally voted for Pat Buchannen.
Jeez!
Cool idea for a product (and probably a patent): a stored dictionary, which one could use to check spelling before posting anything on the Internet.
"Son, at that time, they hadn't yet convinced the government how horrible it is to allow PC's without copy protection to exist. And the people who invented those computers were really communists, intent on destroying America."
"Well, we know better now, right, daddy?"
"Yes, son... of course. The MPAA always knew what was best for us. Bless their wisdom. Let's go listen to your new best of Britney Spears album."
Your reality is lies and balderdash and I'm delighted to say that I have no grasp of it whatsoever. - Baron Munchausen
go to Russian Computer Museum
Your uid reminds me of MetaFilter for some reason.
Perhaps you can pay me by freeing Aunt Jemima from corporate slavery?
...was that they made portable solar arrays to take with you to power the thing (they were *huge*) and that Infocom produced games for it. :)
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
And only a frenchman would be foolish enough to put n/t in the body.
I wonder if they need a wonderfully kept Tandy TRs-80 color computer in mint condition with all the bells and whistles. Anbody else got these around?
~~Some people never go crazy what truly horrible lives they must lead.~~ Charles Bukowski
...can I get Debian to install on any of these bad boys? ;P
nt
"(Man) tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story. But you have to choose: live or tell." --Sartre
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these! They might produce enough processing power to beat my keyboard.
You guys notice the cray 3 GaAs chip as part of the "cray gift", and how it says they wanted to bond the chip directly to the board instead of packing it first?
it never worked -- not because of the lack of money either -- a problem people rarely thinks about is that silicon and PCB material (FR4, for example) has different thermal characteristics -- so when the chip heats up, it heats up the board under it, and then "snap" -- especially considering the small dimension of the contact pad on the chips are (and they are getting smaller and smaller -- making probing (wafer testing) a REALLY exact science) in relationship to the difference in length from the thermal expansion.
it's not until recently, where advances in material sciences (it would actually have to be considered a breakthrough) enabled flip-chip mounts
FYI
My life in the land of the rising sun.
I'll never figure out why they gave the guy who built that machine his own TV show on MTV.
"Oh no, 3 horny women and only 2 condoms...Thank god I read slashdot"
Please, go fuck your mother. Karma means nothing, jackass. If you weren't living in your parents' basement you might realize that.
Aw, fuck it. Let's go bowling. - The Big Lebowski
The Universiteit van Amsterdam (UvA) has a nice Computer Museum too. I was actually surprised to see the lead "UVA Computer Museum" directing me to another site.
Leave it to UVA to put all that information on one long page with lots of graphics. It's really great for modem users. GO HOKIES!!!!!!!
I'm sure my first PC had an AST SixPak at one time or another. I also remember it taking two and a half minutes to load Win3.0 (from the C: prompt, not from switch-on) on my 19MHz XT with 512k of disk cache in Expanded memory. How things have changed. Now it takes ten minutes to load Windows XP on my 1+GHz P3.
Yup -
you think to yourself: "Why the Hell did they put that in the museum? I remember running one of those things when I was a teenager..."
yeah, anyhow, I think you meant "read", not "see"...
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of....
This
Of course it is not a great exhibit. But as something put together by donations from staff, I think it is darn nifty. In fact, I am jealous because my Alma matter Virginia Tech doesn't have a similar setup. I always felt VA Tech was more for the real geeks and UVA was more for the business minded people. UVA is way too greek to be true geek (coo! I just made that up). So I guess I'm going to have to campaign for a museum at VA Tech now. It might be hard because I live on other side of planet now, but it could be made easier by the fact they regularly auctioned off crap.. erh I mean exhibits... this old in auctions. At least they were doing so a few years ago. So how about it! I'm sure there are more than a few Hokies reading Slashdot. Get to work!
[news for me, stuff that doesn't matter]
"You've never experienced the Apple II until you've experienced it in it's original communist red..."
Read the label carefully on that verbatim floppy ... It says it's a l33t warez copy of Zork Text adventure
It's one of the few places of the world where most if not any of the old media (punch cards or wirings) can be converted to new media (floppy/cdrom).
It's quite impressive if you get a change to actually see it. I also liked the story where computers would actually blow up if not being used for a long time, this due to old moving parts that would dry out or expand during the years. Luckily they have a tool shop where they can rebuild certain parts.
Does your C64 actually work? I have two, but they no longer work. I kinda want to see what kind of stupid software I wrote back when I was ten.
-IOVAR Web Dev Platform
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.
naah sig schmig
This has nothing to do with the current topic, but can someone please explain me why before login on, I just go an add for Visual Studio .NET??? I didn't know /. was advertising for microsoft...
*warning: sig* In space, nobody can hear you scream.
Only 26.2 POUNDS!! WOW!! maybe then I could get some exercise! And I'll have no problems calculating the circumference of a circle with that blazing fast 4MHZ!!!! That 60k sure will come in handy with the assembly I'd have to code too!!
heh.. I can't wait to see what my future kids will be saying about the laptops and desktops of today.. "Wow, Grandpa?? You really had to actually use *only* a Gigahertz!!??? With *only* 80 *giga*bytes of space? How did you ever get by???"
hahah
in girum imus nocte et consumimur igni
Took me a while to realize that this was the University of Virgina instead of the University of Amsterdam (also abbreviated UVA), which has a computer museum as well.
As your punishment (I'm using the honour system here) you have to watch Dr Dolittle 1 & 2, Little Nicky, The Waterboy and Police Academies 3 through 6 back-to-back.
---
Yeah, well, that's just, like, your opinion, man.
Ah the joy of a decent manual!
I remember going from MS-DOS 3.2 to 6.2, and wondering why the hell they had removed all useful information from the manual. The 3.2 manual had detailed memory maps, irq listings, an ascii table, keyboard layouts, serial and parallel pinouts, etc. The 6.2 manual just glossed over some commands.
Be wary of any facts that confirm your opinion.
You know when your old when some of that stuff you used or have seen in person!
What no S50 bus computer? Just the S100 stuff?
Wonder why no pickett slide rules?
Hey, nice to see the Osborne in there -- I wrote my first accounting suite in Pascal MT+ for the Osborne. Managed to get an entire invoicing, stock control and debtors ledger on a single floppy disk and ended up selling several thousand copies.
:-(
:-)
But what about the earlier machines that broke new ground:
The CompuColor. This was a great machine. It only had an 8080 processor but was one of the very first "off the shelf" machines to come with amazing (from memory) 128x128 8-color graphics. It also had the disk-drive built into the color screen with a whole 84Kbytes of formatted storage.
The Commodore Pet. Just as every movie ever made to day has an apple of some flavor in it, the Commodore Pet used to be the favorite choice of movie makers when they needed to show a microcomputer somewhere. It's very distinctive looks made it instantly recognizable -- but its lackuster performance and monochrome character-based graphics was a disappointment
The TRS80 model 1. This was the main competition to the Apple II in the late 1970's. I actually preferred it to the Apple as it had a much more powerful BASIC interpreter (double-precision math!) and could be easily converted to display proper lower-case characters. It also had a decidedly flakey expansion unit that could hold up to 32 or 48K of RAM and from which up to four floppy drives could be daisy chained. Add some double-sided, double-density 80-track drives plus a copy of NewDos80 and you could get up to 1.6MB per drive for a whopping total of 6.4MB of online storage!!! Woah, be still my beating heart.
The Intertec SuperBrain. This was a really odd box that looked just like a mainfraime terminal with keyboard, screen and drives all integrated into one whopping great case. It had two 4MHZ Z80 processors -- but only one was ever processing at a time because the second was dedicated solely to the task of polled disk I/O. Looking at the schematics and firmware it appears very much as if the designers used this method because they were too stupid to write good software for a single CPU. Its real claim to fame was that it was one of the first microcomputers with any real networking capability. If you bought one of their enormous 8MB server boxes (with a 8" hard drive) you could then connect up to 255 SuperBrain computers to it using a star topography network that ran over an inflexible and awkward 40-way ribbon cable.
There were numerous other very popular machines out there such as the Ohio Superboard -- a real hacker's delight. For your money you got a built-up circuit board with a full QWERTY keyboard right their on the PCB. You had to add your own power supply, case, monitor, etc -- but they were dirt cheap.
I used to love going to computer shows back in the late 1970's and early 1980s because there was always something *radically* different to see.
These days everything's just a slightly different flavor of IBM PC
Of course I'm a *real* hacker from way-back who built my first computer from scratch back in 1977 and then had to write and hand-assemble my own macro assembler before I could write a BASIC interpreter.
The processor was a Signetics 2650 CPU running at a whopping 1MHZ.
I started with just 1KB of of static ram and when I spent a small fortune to 4Kbytes I thought I was in heaven.
Believe it or not, I actually made some money from programming way back then. I'd hire out my computer to various shops where it would display a scrolling message I'd programmed (in my own BASIC) on a computer screen in the store Window.
In those days, the whole idea of a small computer and computer-generated scrolling text on a screen was so unusual that people would stop and look for many minutes. Great advertising for the stores which hired my little box and paid me to program in their message.
Geez I feel old
I always thought the UvA Computermuseum was over here.
I love old computers and over the years i've visited more than a few of these museum-site's.
These are my two favorites:
- old-computers.com : a fairly new, well maintained site. They already have a big database and it's growing day by day.
- obsolete computer museum: One of the first really good site's.
P.
http://www.google.de/search?q=definately
/. editors should check articles for typos.
peace, love, respect
The Computer Science department of the K.U.Leuven also has a museum online, although the computers in there are not as old as the ones in the UVA computer museum.
is it just me, or do you also find that the B5000 kinda turns you on?
Let us know when they get a real antique personal computer like the Simon, circa 1950.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
i worked as a grunt in the archives of the library at the College of William & Mary (how's that for a crappy sentence?), and i ran into some really coooooool stuff, including boxes full of people's personal effects (professor's glasses, medals, etc.), and boxes full of student records, complete with pictures of them holding _PUNCH CARDS_!
my memory is a little hazy here, but they were holding them a la mugshot style, they were maybe 12"x6", and i believe they had their name written on them as well. but the really interesting thing that i noticed was that these were photos of students holding punch cards into the 80s (again, my memory is not great, but i think it was til '83).
to hear that from someone from va-tech. Still waiting to upgrade that 14.k modem, eh?
I'm sure the generous patrons at UVA might consider a loan of some of these museum pieces for use in your labs, but only if you ask real nice...
Wahoo-wa.
(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.
Mod Karma -1: I sed bad wurds. If I cep my mouf shut, I wud be at riyses.
Back in 1996, I worked about 15 feet from the computer museum as a modeler/texture-mapper for the alice project, which is now at carnegie mellon but at that time was still at the UVa CS dept. I spent much of the summer sleeping in a couch in the lab, and would walk past many of the old computer display cases when I would wake up and go to the bathroom to brush my teeth and wash my face. I have to say, it was easy to spend hours wandering along those display cases; but what always struck me was that modern computers not only look the same, but they *continue* to look the same. Were I to dissasemble the circe 1994/5 SGI I used in the alice lab, it would probably not look much different from the circa 2000 SGI desktop I'm typing this at right now.
I guess bland homogeneity is what we pay for standardization and progress, but it seems like there is no concept of unique technologies anymore, or at least unique technologies that can be observed without a microscope.
Well, that's all, I just got a pang of nostalgia seeing the museum mentioned.
lorem ipsum, dolor sit amet
Gee, and I thought they might have a shot of one of those VAX assembler code manuals with all 340+ instruction codes. :-> Now, that's fun programming.
~ kjrose
actually, in CS computer requirement spec sheet. students suppose to have computer that can run mandrake linux perfectly. infact, many of CS labs machine, despite of several alphas, are mandrake based. i just took the first CS class ( intro to C++ ); they req'd me to use VC++. but i believe that in data structure, they req'd the usage of linux .. any flavor, i guess
data struct is sophormore's, so CS students here start linux on thier second year. but eng ppl usually run win2k box since they have to use industrial-standard-program such as UniGraphics ( licenses were donated to engr student ), AutoCAD, Matlab, etc..
that were for ugrad student anyway, i know lots of phd student here that use linux box.. req'd for their research though.
oh.. one more thing. despite from required usage of linux. the system that 'automatically' grade student's source code ( named 'curator' ) run on NT. i believe the research of this system is funded by microsoft.
Remember the first Tandy Manuals?....my guess is, once they figured out how to put the info in the command line itself(either in man pages, or the classic -h /h -? or --help), it became "more profitable" not to put it in the actual manuals.....giving Windoze the easy catch of the customers....
"existant" isn't a word either. :-P
I picked one of these up in the hallway outside some university faculty member's office with a note on it that said "TRASH". Their trash my treasure.
It's got a modem, and the 4 inch amber display is to die for. I'm yet to use a portable with as nice of a keyboard. It's the only portable I have that weighs over 20 lbs.
I'm glad they've found a use for the stuff they used to just stack in dumpsters. Several years ago I picked up 5 or six old ps/2s, an oscilloscope, and a rack mounted 100-node Transputer array from a UVA dumpster.
You would be surprised how much punch cards are still used today. A lot of old factory/assembly line automation is controlled via punch cards. And it probably will stay in use as long as they continue to do the job. Why spend $ on expensive computer automation upgrades, when the old tech gets the job done.
I had an Osborne 1; as a matter o' fact, I had two of 'em. The second one had a *hard drive* - an external device the size of a shoebox, containing a bottomless pit into which one could pour data without ever filling it up. 11 MB, $1400 - eat yer hearts out! I had the external monitor adapter, too, a handy device that gave you a composite video out so you didn't die from eyestrain.
;)
It's not entirely true that you had to use a particular manufacturer's disks - CP/M warez for the DEC Z80 micros (Rainbow?) worked great in the Osborne, and often cost less. Does anyone remember "CP/M Power", with the original undelete?
The jar of punch card chad brought back a few memories, too . . . my roomdog and I collected the stuff for a month by surreptitiously emptying the university's card punches until we had a garbage can full, which was used to inundate the front seat of an enemy's car one night . . . heh heh heh. I wish I still had a jug; you could also make dandy simulated bird poop from a mixture of chad (called Numer-Bits by us), flour, and water.
Ah, yes...fondly remember playing "Hunt the Wumpus" on a SYM-1 my father used to bring home from work. He had all kinds of cool machines there and would bring them home from time to time...at one point we had a Xerox Star or whatever that word processor was called.
to not have broadband.
I guess you'd probably have to sell all your livestock to afford it though.
Go Hoos.
- Very poorly put together (I worked in a computer store at the time, and clearly recall the owner/technician/salesman cursing the unreliability of the thing. It was hard to keep the display model working, let alone the one's he'd sold...
- You had to buy pre-formatted floppies from the manufacturer. The "format floppy" command was really justan "erase" command. The OS couldn't (wouldn't) format floppies on its own.
- The pixel-addresssible graphics mode was really broken up into little regions that (coincidentally?) were about the same size/shape as a character cell (my recollection: 384x256, which would be 64x32 character cells at 6x8 pixels each, but I may be wrong). You could only have two colors in any one cell: foreground and background. If you drew two lines that crossed in a cell, the color of the pixels from the first line would coerce the pixels from the first line into the new color. So, while you could individually address all those pixels, you couldn't really control the colors properly.
On the plus side, it had a really cool color Star Trek game, that used the limited graphics in ingenious ways. I think it had a very flexible character generator, and the game was all done by creating a custom character set that had little enterprises, klingons and romulans...I'm not even going to get started on the NorthStar Horizon (64K of RAM!, dual floppies!, case made of WOOD!), or I'll start showing my age.
Whoops, too late.
"...the original Osborne portable computer ..."
so Ozzy had a computer maker company?
I guess is a f*ckin' PC..
I still use my 386-25, and it still works great, booting off that 80 mb harddrive (we got the extra large size because 40 we knew someone who filled a 40 mb drive) Runing slockware 3.0, with some sort of upgrade. Last year I finially put it behind a firewall when I got sick of wondering what all that activity in syslog was about.
See, your laughing already. Actually considering the pace of technology you would laugh at my after server too, a dual ppro overclocked to 200. I find that both systems are plenty fast, though I don't run x on the 386.
I love the colsole with the ash tray on it. Some old IBM consoles had built-in ash trays.
Back then people used to smoke in grocery stores, drop the butt on the isle floor and stomp it out. The employees would later sweep it up.
My how things have changed. . . .
I'm a CS major at UVA. The reason for the page's linear setup is because that's apparently the trademark of Professor Gabe Robins. Go ahead, click on his Images page. This guy is a genius at everything he does, except for making picture pages. Like most decent colleges, we have a t3 with good rates, and even that gets clogged up by his images page. Dr. Robins did work with the military, so I used to joke that the page was created to take down enemy machines. I pass the museum every time I go to Olsson (CS building), but haven't been to its site and thought it was funny that the connection-killer layout is back. Oh, and the Tech vs. UVA retards: enough is enough. Go Hockeys. Durrrr! School rivalries are gay, both schools their shares of bright people. Rather, than fight over non-existent entities like school pride, the intelligent folks everywhere need to band against rampant idiocy, or we'll get swallowed by the morons.
it's about as close to a geek house of horrors you can get...
No, this line is:
Power triode. Similar in size to power tubes used on the early computers, but this particular tube type is brand-new. It can be compared with a power transistor of comparable power rating.The image of the tube in question shows an Eimac transmitting triode.
Computer equipment? Only if ENIAC had an early 50MHz wireless trans-Atlantic LAN that we don't know about.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
Can you install Linux on this?
"The two most abundant elements in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity." -Harlan Ellison
www.old-computer.com
Has heaps of stuff I remember. From the early seventies onwards.
I was disappointed at the scetchy coverage of the 1950s and 1960s, and at the innacuracy of the narrative, e.g., citing the B5000 as not available until 1964.
Take some time reading about the B5000. Please note that it did multiprocessing, compilers into machine language, system reconfiguration without reprogramming resource defines, etc.
And all of it written in ALGOL, the great grandfather of C and the first machine-portable language.
Then consider the B6700, which among other things brought us virtual memory and the aforementioned resource stacks. Add in CANDE, WFL and a system that can restart it's jobs in recovery mode right after a Halt/Load (reboot/IPL), a database that could do online backups in the 1980s, and you have THE mainframe. This stuff was so far ahead of IBM that IBM kind of caught up somewhere in 1989, after Burroughs was busy shooting itself in the foot becoming Unisys.
Alas, the same magnificent engineers created an I/O bottleneck monster with their design that they never quite got fixed. That, and Burroughs never built a sales force like IBM. So IBM continued to whack them even though Burroughs had an utterly superior product. Then the Unisys merger disaster occurred, and Burroughs never recovered. Now they sell A-series MCP emulators running on souped-up superservers, but really sell those 20-way NT boxes.
And so like the Amiga, we must salute a superior design that never dominated like it should have.
Bow to MCP!!!!
________________________________________ History Must Not Fall Into The Wrong Hands ___________________________________
NOBODY CARES!!!
Sharrrrronnnnn! I can't )(*&)(@&$ remember anything...