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Computer History Museum Gets the Attention It Deserves
mcpublic writes "For years the Computer History Museum has been quietly collecting and displaying the computational relics of yesteryear. Now, finally the New York Times Arts Section shines the spotlight on this most nerdy of museums. Speak Steampunk? You can find a working replica of Babbage's Difference Engine in the lobby of the museum's Mountain View, California home. Of course, the vast majority of the collection is electronic, and though 'big iron' is king, that hasn't stopped dedicated volunteers from bringing back to life pioneering 'mini' computers like the 1960 PDP-1 and the first video game software ever: Spacewar!"
http://www.computerspielemuseum.de/1210_Home.htm
Visited this summer. They have quite a collection of computer games.
And my Commodore PET never had fur. I was so disappointed :(
Right on! :^)
FYI Another "Working Computer Museum" up since about 15 years in Palazzolo Acreide, Sicily, nearby Siracusa,
privately run by volunteers and collectors: http://museum.dyne.org/
(website in Italian and some english, remote access to computers offered via telnet and ssh)
Definitely the way to go. Wait another 20 years and we'll all be establishment
you might want to check the your pipes since i do not see "bits made out of wood" in the linked article.
and i know of a set of (plastic) counters that are used to teach number so "bits" could be made out of wood
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You've never heard of a "wood bit?"
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
People have to understand the history of technology, otherwise they forget what it took to get here, or worse, they attribute every single invention to NASA or space. Nothing irks me more than people who are willing to forget entire generations of researchers, scientists and general tinkerers just so they can continue to believe in their space mythology.
It's easy to forget that early computers used expensive labor intensive ferrite core memory. Core memory had to be assembled by skilled technicians who threaded each core on a matrix of wires. I once heard that four kilobytes of twelve bit memory cost over thirty thousand dollars back in the early sixties when silver was still the coin of the realm. These old relics were also power hungry. Sac State once had an RCA 301 that was stashed in the Non Destructive Testing lab (The building was adjacent to the river levy and immediately south of the Guy West footbridge and at the time used for storage.) We counted nearly a farad of capacitance in the power supply modules. I wonder what became of the core module from that machine. We used it as a display piece during a couple of open houses.
I call it, "Computer History Museum!"
Every geek has one of these museums at home: cables with biomorph connectors, interfaces to nowhere, Ninja Star shaped floppy disks, 1K ICs, a smokey fan . . .
You just can't part with this stuff . . . you WILL find a use for it someday . . .
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
I went to The Computer Museum (Boston) before The Computer History Museum was ever opened. I hadn't realized The Computer Museum was closed until this article and I looked it up. Like the Boston Museum (the official owners of The Computer Museum after the merge), my local museum has some computer stuff on display, but an Atari 2600 and other garage sale level equipment on display in good condition isn't the same as a room-sized CPU, annotated and with lights.
Learn to love Alaska
True, but for 25 years they were made out of ferrite donuts.
The determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language.
Sitting on a Cray, and seeing the Utah teapot.
For those of us on the other side of the pond there is a reasonably good computer history museum at Bletchley Park. The computer section at the Science Museum in London is also well worth a visit providing you remember that the Pilot Ace is on the ground floor.
Ganty
Besides the computer history museum, there's also The MADE a video game museum. I'm not sure which one is "the most nerdy of museums".
Classic science and engineering museums have been dumbed down. The Smithsonian used to be hard core, back when they were in the Arts and Industries building. The assumption was that visitors knew something about the subject and were there to see the historic original. The Henry Ford Museum used to be hard-core. ("Capacitor, Cornell-Dublier, 1932"), but they added more "explanatory" exhibits.
The South Kensington Science Museum (now the "London Science Museum") has gone soft, too. I saw it in 1985 and 2002, and it felt dumber in 2002. They still have Maudsley's lathe (the first really good machine tool) on display. But the collection of James Bond cars from movies was getting the attention.
Attracts the most neckbeards and stoners than either of those.
Why do you think that steampunk is not useful?
In general, steampunk just means that you are building something using nineteenth century technology that would be easier to build with twenty-first century technology. It should all be useful. If it's not useful, then that's a failure of the designer. The Difference Engine is classic steampunk. One of the first steampunk novels was Gibson and Sterling's The Difference Engine: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Difference_Engine
It's great to see computer history getting some more attention. Many people like to turn up their nose at anything "old", but there is much that can be learned from computing history. There was much innovation and not all ideas were fully explored.
And the mistakes of history are repeating themselves. Anyone who thinks touch screens are new should look up the 1983 HP 150 touch screen computer.
The Smithsonian used to be hard core, back when they were in the Arts and Industries building. The assumption was that visitors knew something about the subject and were there to see the historic original.
Placing technology in its historical and social context is part of the job of the modern museum.
Rosa Parks Bus. Driving America
How much can you learn from a static display ---- how much more from the dynamic?
John Bull: Riding the Rails
is to force chicks to wear corsets so their sagging tits hit their chins.
Ah, so true. Oldest piece of computer history I have is a 4 kilobit core, though many of the bits have broken off of it. Apple II disk controller cards, 4116 memories, random power supplies, various Macs, any number of modems...
It's all fun stuff. The most interesting pieces I have are an IBM 704 module with eight IBM vacuum tubes, and a CDC6600 cordwood logic module (see it on Wikipedia). Just sold a Remington Rand tube module to a collector. Apparently, it was the only one from its type of computer still in existence.
The determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language.
When they trot out an iPad 2 (which has more LINPACK compute power than a Cray-2 BTW)
I remember sometime around the late 1970's or early 1980's of seeing an exhibit, in Atlanta, of Soviet Computer Technology. This was perhaps during one of the thaws in the cold war that happened at that time. The one thing that I remember most clearly was a complex machine that had automated the threading of ferrite cores to form memory planes. These were all hand made at that time. It was the star of the show. Of course it was also invented in the same year that the last ferrite core based memory was being used in the US for most computers. The new memory chips were faster, and cheaper than even the machine made core planes.
However, magnetic memory was still used for its ability to retain state without power for special applications. Only when NVRAM reached a point where it was better, faster and cheaper did most non-moving magnetic memory go away.
I just bailed in a hurry from a recent residence. I left everything in the attic behind except an old portable compaq 386 that's intrinsically wierd. Most of it wasn't too archaic anyway.
Imagine how upset I was with my Amiga...
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
i like it
Here's some great pictures of the place.
For those on this side of the atlantic... http://www.retrocomputermuseum.co.uk or www.facebook.com/retrocomputermuseum
Or a drill bit?
Because we all know that nothing really exists until it's acknowledged by a parochial east coast newspaper.