The Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California

I attended the O'Reilly conference, Strata, for work in the beginning of February, in Santa Clara, California.

While I was out there, I paid a visit to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View.  I had visited once before, in December of 2008, while on Google's campus for the Ubuntu Developer Summit.  However, we had to rush through the museum very quickly, in order to get to our banquet on time.

When we drove through Silicon Valley on our Reboot the Soul roadtrip, we specifically stopped in Mountain View to visit the museum again.  However, the damn thing was closed for renovations when we were there (October 2010).  Bummer.

Anyway, I took advantage of my proximity to the museum on this trip to visit it again, going through the exhibits very slowly, by myself, soaking it all in.  I loved it ;-)

The exhibits start with some really old school, mechanical computers, such as the ancient abacus and here, Napier's Bones.  I took an independent study class in college, the History of Mathematics, which comprised of reading the 3-volume text, Mathematical Thought from Ancient to Modern Times.  It was fun to see some of the machines that were covered in that class.

This is a scale replica of Charles Babbage's Difference Engine Number 1 (which he didn't quite complete).

Needless to say, the history of IBM was well covered throughout the museum.  The Think aspect of IBM's brand is probably the part I appreciate the most, as a former employee.

Always interesting to someone who works in cryptography (eCryptfs, specifically), the Enigma machine!  The importance to the eventual outcome of World War II cannot be overstated, of the Allies cracking this cipher!

And here's UNIVAC, on loan from the Smithsonian Institution.  I think I saw this very machine in the Smithsonian in July 2000.

And the grandfather of all super computers, the beautiful IBM s/360!

Here's a look at the inside of a Cray supercomputer.  Look at all of those wires!

I've seen the original UNIX license plate, on the back of Jon "Maddog" Hall's Jeep in New Hampshire :-)  This is merely a replica!

Kim really got a kick out of this, the first prototype of the computer mouse, made of wood, and having only one button :-)

And I got a kick out several Speak & Spells that were on display.  My sisters and I played with these things for years!  I think I played through it's entire catalog of questions over several years.  I can still hear it's weird voice intonation :-) As I turned it off, I always thought it sounded more like "ruh-bye" than "good bye".  Still, the text-to-voice rendering was highly advanced for the time.

I never owned an Altair, but this computer is a legend of its time.

My parents bought this model IBM PS/1, used at a school board auction for a couple of hundred dollars, at my urging when I was in about 4th grade, I think.

There were only really two mentions of Linux, that I noticed in the museum.  One was on an exhibit about Beowulf Clusters, which emerged in the 1990s and could reach super computer capacity and speeds at a fraction of the cost.  Beowulf clusters were typically running some hodgepodge of Linux operating systems.   Also, this exhibit noted Linus Torvalds, and his easygoing approach to software development and open source software.

This was one of the original Google search racks from the nearby Google campus, assembled entirely from Fry's components. I bet Google necessarily had to make these systems redundant, given the quality of products one typically acquires from Fry's ;-)

I never owned a phone coupler modem, as these came just little before my time.  But this does bring back memories of Mathew Broderick in Wargames!

Finally, the grand exhibit in the museum is a 1:1, working scale model of the Babbage Difference Engine #2.  There are demos of it working several times per day.  Unfortunately, I didn't get to see one this time.  Maybe next time!

 If you're ever in the area, I highly recommend a visit.

Cheers,
:-Dustin