The Computer History Museum

Well, I would have written and posted this last night, except that I spilled water on my desktop computer's keyboard, which left me without functional R, V or Delete (forward or backward) keys for the evening. So that was that. Everything dried out by tonight, so here I am, back again.

Of course, this is nothing compared to the catastrophe that Ceej suffered earlier today.

This weekend my friend Karen visited. She spent the last year here, on loan from her university, but now she's returned to Portland. But she came back for a business trip, and spent the weekend hanging around with Debbi and me.

We did the usual things - Karen and I have known each other for almost 15 years, and I pretty much have down pat what it takes to entertain her on a trip here: Ghirardelli Square, good food, good conversation, and a trip to the sea (Half Moon Bay this time, with brunch at the Main Street Grill).

But we also spent Saturday afternoon at the Computer History Museum.

The museum includes much of the stock which used to live at Boston's Computer Museum (which I think was an adjunct to the Children's Museum), and many more items. They say their public exhibit - called "Visible Storage - comprises only about 5% (yes, that's five percent) of their stock. They managed to buy one of the Silicon Graphics buildings after the Dot Com bust, and a very nice venue it is.

If you want to visit, check hours on their Web site, as they're only open a few days a week. Go for one of the docent-led tours, as it's worth it. Our docent was quite entertaining and knowledgeable, full of many interesting facts and good jokes. The tour is about 90 minutes, and you could easily spend another hour going over the other parts of the exhibit afterwards.

The museum is set up chronologically, with some ancient abacuses and more recent slide rules leading off the exhibit, then moving to 19th century calculating machines and early 20th century machines such as an Enigma Machine (which by the way features prominently in Alastair Reynolds' novel Century Rain) and analog computers (the output of which was displayed on an oscilloscope!).

Most of the exhibit is used for digital computers from the 1940s (ENIAC, Whirlwind), 1950s (Johnniac, SOAR defense computers), 1960s (IBM 360), and 1970s (Cray supercomputers, PDP and VAXen), and you can watch the evolution of computers from vacuum tubes to transistors, from teletypes to monitors, and so forth. Each machine has a significant slab of hardware available to gawk at (by the 1970s, of course, computers were small enough that they have the whole things), so it's quite a good visual demonstration.

The museum is free to the public, but they do ask for donations. It's well worth the trip, though. Very cool stuff to see. Karen and I would exchange glances from time to time when one of the machines touched on our shared programming history.

A fun time.