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!"

Comments

Core Memory

[djl4570]

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.

Re:Berlin's Computerspielemuseum

[dingen]

You should definitely check out the Heinz Nixdorf museum in Padenborn, Germany. It's the largest collection of old computers on display anywhere in the world. Make sure you get the English audio tour from the reception though, as nearly all of the texts within the museum are written in German.

It truly is an awesome place, with lots of wonderful machines, including (but by no means limited to) a piece of a Jacquard loom, a real German WW2 Enigma, lots of huge old IBM machines, a full Zuse Z11 (including a modified typewriter to function as printer!), some PDP's, a Xerox Alto, an Altair 8800, an Apple I. One could spend a week in there, it's simply amazing.