Computer History Museum
Today we checked out the Computer History Museum. Pretty interesting stuff. Had a tour around the “archive” where they had all sorts of stuff from the dawn of computing, starting with the abacus, all the way up to the machine that beat Kasparov at a chess tournament. Some highlights included a US automated missile defence computer console (complete with built-in ashtray and lighter!) and the flight control computer from an Apollo lunar module.
During the tour, the guide kept mentioning that a group of volunteers were refurbishing an original IBM 4201 computer. (We’re talking 50’s or 60’s vintage here…) After the tour Rob and I went to find these guys. When we walked into their lab they couldn’t wait to tell us about what they were up to! It was actually great fun. These guys were in their 70’s at least. One of them had been working on this stuff since WWII. The older guy was working on a card reader (he’d pulled it to bits to find all the broken parts and was in the process of putting it back together). They all joked that they hoped he got it back together before he died! He actually showed us the faulty components - a couple of steel shafts where the bearings had worn out so they wouldn’t turn properly!!! (They don’t make ‘em like that anymore!) They actually had the 4201 CPU mostly running (i.e. it could add and subtract) so that it was doing 20 or so of it’s 35 instructions properly. Multiplication and division was an optional extra (no joke!).
Some other highlights were the original Apple 1 computer (You had to provide your own keyboard, screen and power supply) and a prototype for the Palm Pilot.