We keep going places, and I keep trying to get caught up in writing about them. (Actually, I have a little case of writer's block.) The most interesting destination this month (so far) is the Computer History Museum. It's located south of San Francisco smack dab in the middle of Silicon Valley close to the Google campus. It was a surprise to me Google headquarters isn't a building, it's several buildings in a campus like setting. We also passed the Facebook headquarters. I laughed as we drove by since the Facebook address is: "One Hacker Way". Really.
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| Marker 'posts' |
The Computer History Museum is in a Bauhaus style modern building of curved glass. It's the only museum I've ever been to where the exhibits are in numbered sections. The curators did everything except paint a dotted line on the floor for the patrons to walk on. Naturally, the museum is laid out chronologically. "Computing" originally meant arithmetic as it related to buying and selling goods as well as building and ocean navigation. Gradually it came to include scientific application particularly in astronomy. The abacus was woefully inadequate in handling complex math which required intensive and extensive arithmetic and mathematics. The following picture shows a promotional product which I thought was hilarious. Most people don't remember that the electronic calculator is only about 40 years old, and it was the basis of Hewlett Packard. In 1970 HP offered a $395 hand held electronic calculator based on the Texas Instruments transistor. It could perform scientific functions. By 1980 anybody could buy a hand held calculator for $10.
I was fascinated by this museum on lots of levels. First, it helped me understand that the Electronic Revolution (or whatever it winds up being called in 50 years). It has had many of the same societal impacts as the Industrial Revolution. There's been the same rapid pace of change, the seemingly inexhaustible number of new inventions, new products and applications as a result of research and development. Electronics has transformed the economic base of every society around the world with winners and losers inside each economy. To illustrate - the first computers arose out of the universities and were used for scientific purposes of calculation. Governmental research and development centered on national defense and missile guidance. Business and personal usage followed behind both of these.
Early computers were powered by thousands of vacuum tubes linked with miles of wire. The most famous of these early ones is Eniac, but the Johnniac (same era) was more fun to see.
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| The Johnniac |
It's hard to imagine computers the size of rooms which generated so much heat they had to be placed on elevated floors so air could circulate underneath, and in sealed rooms to eliminate contamination from dust and smoke and whatever. The 1957 "Desk Set" movie's version of a computer wasn't too far off the mark. For those of you who have never seen a vacuum tube, this is what they look like up close. The Eniac and the Johnniac were scientific computers with memories of 1024 words. (One character = 8 bytes.)
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| vacuum tubes connected with wires |
You fed information you wanted the machine to calculate via punch cards which was the program. Punch cards and punch card operators were an early job casualty of the computer business.
To develop a computer to be used for business, IBM sequestered a group of engineers in a motel for months in order to reduce distractions, so they could conceive of a computer which could be built afford-ably, installed quickly, and be used by businesses for accounting and inventory purposes. They developed the IBM 1401.
This machine was in its own room since volunteers at the Computer Museum were restoring it to working order. This is the first machine Drake worked with professionally. It was operated around the clock by Computer Operators (another job casualty) whose jobs were to feed punch card programs into the machine and keep all the tubes and parts functioning. Suddenly, corporations had Data Processing Departments with employees who spoke a totally different language and performed magic which was not understood by anyone else in the company. Drake was one of those people. Seeing this machine was a waltz down memory lane for Drake.
The IBM 1401 was introduced by a self-produced movie to the business world. Unfortunately, there was only one working 1401 at the time. IBM engineers were afraid to move it to make the movie because they weren't sure it would work if it was relocated. The IBMer's solved the problem by making the machine in the movie a mock-up with IBM engineers standing behind the giant magnetic tape decks twirling them by hand to simulate the 'computer' running. This monstrosity weighed 9000 pounds, had 5 miles of wire in it, contained 10,600 transistors, and was the size of a one car garage. It went on the market in mid 1960 and had an amazing amount of memory: 16,000 bytes. To give some perspective, I have a 32 gigabyte iphone. ONE gigabyte is one billion bytes and my iphone has 32 times that much. See what I mean by rapid change? The IBM 1401 was a wild success. It accounted for approximately one-half of all the computers in the world - all 50,000 of them in 1965. Because Drake could relate personally to this machine, it brought home to me the tremendous impact of computers on our society in only 50 short years.
There are twenty 'sign posts' in the Computer History Museum. We saw everything in detailed minutiae. One of the highlights were the early desk tops, and I discovered WHY the first personal computers were designed with a keyboard, computer screen that looked like a small TV, on top of a processing 'tower'. The very first personal computers were individually built at home by a few engineers and scientists. This one was built by a Xerox engineer, (with wooden cases) for his personal use at home. His vision of what a home computer should look like is what eventually became the standard for the desk top computer.
One of the twenty 'stations' in the museum was Gaming. There was even a 'pong' machine that was interactive - and yes, I'm still horrible at pong. Those silver knobs were the controls. The gaming screen consisted of just what you see - a line and two 'pongs'.
I could go on and on. We were here for about 3 hours, and I took over 300 pictures (of course). If you want to see more, click on the link:
https://plus.google.com/u/0/photos/115478608971584948192/albums/6036459133644053793?authkey=CNndgpWltNjEGw
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