Part 3: Computer History Museum

20180401

The Trip

The Photos

The photos below are what we saw.

Kathleen poses next to a dinosaur skeleton replica on the Google campus.

The Google campus has nice amenities including outdoor cafe areas.

Modern Art.  I am sure that the Google guys can tell you the significance of this statue.

Nice colors on the building.  Google has loaner bikes for their employees so they can efficiently get around campus.

The campus was well done and very pleasant.

Spring has sprung in the Bay Area and the flowers were blooming.  We were out pretty early in the day so the nighttime dew was still on the blooms.

We passed a number of nice bloom of various species.

I love flowers, but they are pretty hard to photograph due to depth of field issues, that is to say that not all of the bloom is in "critical" focus at the same time.  Note that in the above photo the rear of the bloom is (generally) in good focus but the front is not.

Adjusting the camera/lens settings can help produce a better photo, but even so the depth of field problem is hard to address.  The bloom above still has dew from the previous night.

Smaller blooms are usually better subjects.

The fruit trees were in bloom as well.

This is one of the first interactive computer terminals every operationally deployed.  During the Cold War billions of dollars were thrown at technology development and this station was one of the by-products.  The SAGE (Semi-automated Ground Environment) System was designed as a command and control system to coordinate defense against incoming Soviet bombers and missiles.  The "pistol" at the bottom center of the photo has a CRT scan-line reader that allows the system to note the position of the pistol on the screen, thereby allowing the operator to select targets for scrutiny.  This pistol was an early precursor to touch screens used on all smart phones today.

Back in the day when I was working for the Navy, we had to test NTDS-compliant devices.  This rack is part of the NTDS backbone.

Ah, the good-old-days of the "big iron"  Note the switches to "toggle in" a bootstrapping loader.

Sad to say, but I have written plenty of code for the S/360.

Back in the 60's and 70's, IBM totally controlled the mainframe world and sold tons of very expensive peripherals including things like this disk drive.  Today, a hard drive with the equivalent capacity of this device would fit in your watch, but it would be greatly surpassed by the cheapest USB thumbdrive from Bestbuy.  Jeez, this is embarrassing, but I also worked at a company that manufactured 9-track tape drives, a compact replacement for the refrigerator-sized drives in the background of the photo above.

With this device, when you suffer a "head crash" the device ate itself due to the rotational inertia of the spindle.

A drum storage device with one set of read/write heads per track.  The stripes on the surface of the magnetic material resulted from misadjusted heads.

An older CDC mainframe.  I worked on one of these while in college.

A smaller CDC system designed by Seymour Cray before he formed Cray Computer.

Still sad to say I have written plenty of code for the PDP-8.  And other Digital Equipment Corp machines including the PDP-10.  And PDP-11.  And VAX 11/780.



And, I am really sad to admit I purchased one of these units before IBM started selling the PC/XT and PC/AT.  In the end, I bought the XT and later the AT as they became available.  I am no stranger to 8" and 5.25" floppy discs and shoe box-sized 10MB hard drives.  Been there.  Done that.  All of it.  The PET was a pretty good implementation for what it was, but it used a midget (non-standard) keyboard and had a really cheap cassette tape as the data storage device which limited it's utility as a "real" computer.  But, it was a good training tool.  The Motorola 6802 chip had a good instruction set and was programmer "friendly".  A BASIC interpreter was the only development tool available, but it did support character-level graphics on the black and white screen.

Photos and Text Copyright Bill Caid 2018, all rights reserved.
For your enjoyment only, not for commercial use.