Computer History Museum
Photos – What a blast I had at the Computer History Museum in Mountainview. They have so many artifacts in their collection. It helped string together some of the progression that is often difficult to see when you are in the midst of it. I worked for computer companies NCR Corporation and Compaq during the ’80s and ’90s, and it was great to see so many “blasts from the past.” It makes sense that Silicon Valley would have such a comprehensive collection. And the exhibits are creative and fun, often using multimedia. The final exhibit with videos from technology innovators was quite inspiring.
Click on a photo below to open gallery in a light box.
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- The name of the exhibit Revolution: The First 2000 Years of Computing. It starts with looking at early calculation devices, like the abacus.
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- Punch cards! Early computer storage.
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- One of the first computers, the Atanasoff-Berry
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- Women and computing exhibit.
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- Expected to see more of NCR in this exhibit, my old employer. They invented the cash register, moved into computers, storage, services.
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- IBM 360
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- From 1974. Insightful today.
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- This wall depicted the progression of programming languages.
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- An ad from the 70s showing how small the computer was. A woman’s boot…
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- Exhibit depicting Moore’s law – that computing power doubles every 18 months.
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- Early computer mice.
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- The first Apple, signed by Woz. It was just a board. User had to supply their own keyboard, monitor.
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- The Altair 8800 – Bill Gates and Paul Allen wrote the programming language for it, Altair Basic.
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- An Apple II
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- Another of my former employers. This is a Compaq Portable.
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- Mac and Lisa!
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- Personal computer section.
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- My students should know the answer to this.
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- My students should also recognize an IMP from the videos we watch on the History of the Internet.
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- Bob Metcalfe talks about Ethernet on video. He’s on the faculty at UT now.
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- Yup, it’s Al Gore. He was responsible for the government initiative that created the Internet.
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- A Next box. – Steve Jobs’ company after he left Apple. Tim Berners-Lee used to invent the Web.
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- Definition of hypertext.
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- Web 2.0 exhibit.
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- I almost bought this. Almost.