Friday, January 17, 2014

Computer History Museum

I was wearing a T-shirt that said 01000100 01000001 01000100. They had one for sale which said 01000011 01001000 01001101... How geeky is that!?! *

Our first stop was a demo of a 'Difference Engine'. This is a mechanical device, designed 150 years ago by Charles Babbage. The guy giving the demo was suitably old himself and gave a great explanation of how it worked and what the results were. Due to learning a method for working out the polynomial for a sequence of numbers as part of Zak's math homework during the year, it made a lot more sense to me than it ever did before...

This difference engine is on loan from a guy from Microsoft. The British museum hit him up for a donation to complete one they had built and he gave them money conditional on them building him one too. He wanted it for his lounge but it has been in the Computer History Museum since it arrived in the US.

We took a guided tour - the guide took us to the ENIAC display, on to its commercial derivative (UNIVAC) then on to some other of the more important machines in computing history (IBM 360, DEC PDP-8) and on to the super computers - IBM Stretch and CRAY-1 with a Connection Machine just across from them. (It was a bit like reliving 07.440 with Prof Bob about 20 years ago :-) ). The tour was pretty long and the kids, especially Emma, didn't stick with it for the entire time. We did another lap through after the tour and the kids found the games section and I found the personal computers. They had an example of everything I had ever seen prior to about 1982 including my first machine which was right beside their Apple 1.

I got only a quick look at their IBM 1401 and DEC PDP-1 displays before we ran to the car park to complete our trip to San Francisco to return the rental car by the target time of 5PM (which turned out to be more like 5:45).

(Unfortunately, no one other than me took any pictures and I don't have a way of getting it from my camera to the iPad...).

BB

* Mine says DAD, theirs said CHM (Computer History Museum).


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad


3 comments:

  1. Doesn't 01000001 01000100 01000001 = ADA?

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    Replies
    1. Yep, that is what comes from doing stuff in the middle of the night. Fixed now. Thanks.

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    2. Too technical for me, I would be with Emma and not stick around!

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