A Trip Down Computer Memory Lane

News.com has an interesting stroll down memory lane with a look at the "DigiBarn", a collection of technology from early mechanical calculators to modern web appliances. NASA contractor Bruce Damer and partner Alan Lundell run this "museum in transition" from a 19th-century farmhouse deep in the Santa Cruz mountains. In addition to notable success milestones, the company also includes some of the industry failures, like an Apple III Damer acquired from Apple's legal department.

Comments

Re:Accuracy

[Anonymous Coward]

The Osborne II, and news of its impending release, is what killed the Osborne I and the company. It is a cautionary tale in not releasing news of an impending product upgrade too early. Particularly when you have huge unsold stock of the prior product.

They should include that famous Bill Gates quote in the article.

Re:Why no link to the actual museum?

[ruiner13]

s it that hard to put a link to the actual museum instead of to page 2 of an article that talks about said museum? Are the mods asleep today? There are no ads on the museum site, so no revenue to drive up by linking to it.

Re:Accuracy

[WhatAmIDoingHere]

The one he never said, you mean?

Re:Cassette tape? Where are the MP3s???

[TheRaven64]

I'm a little surprised that people haven't converted these old tapes to MP3s; I think there are probably better ways of doing this. There are emulators that can read the audio data, and so it would be simpler to just store a digital copy of the data; I doubt MP3 could get the data down to anything like the size of the original, which is likely to be well under 64KB (it must be smaller than the amount of RAM the machine has, or it couldn't have been loaded. Even big programs that had to be loaded in segments weren't more than 100KB or so).

A few emulators can read from WAV files of the tapes. MP3 should be okay bandwidth-wise, but the psycho-acoustic model throws away information humans can't hear, and I don't know if that is a problem for some data encodings. The WAV-reading only exists to load files from old tapes, it's not a sensible long-term storage mechanism.