Today I visited the Living Computer Museum, a fun little place in downtown Seattle, with a bunch of old hardware that kids can put their grubby fingers on. It's a really cool place, I even got to see a Data General Nova with a working teletype attached to it, a really fantastic piece of hardware which served as the technical inspiration for a lot of later developments, including the Xerox Alto and Apple I. It's really neat hardware.
file:~/org/data/41/0af40a-fe15-42db-9f02-5b23cf68fe8d/P9040268.JPG #+CAPTION: Attempting TECO
file:~/org/data/41/0af40a-fe15-42db-9f02-5b23cf68fe8d/P9040269.JPG #+CAPTION: The Data General Nova
file:~/org/data/41/0af40a-fe15-42db-9f02-5b23cf68fe8d/P9040270.JPG #+CAPTION: The Data General Nova's guts
There were a tonne of really beautiful DEC machines, the simple design and color schemes of the PDPs are really wonderful, and I didn't take nearly enough photos of them.
file:~/org/data/41/0af40a-fe15-42db-9f02-5b23cf68fe8d/P9040271.JPG #+CAPTION: DEC Data System
The museum was funded by Paul Allen, and that much is clear -- a huge section on Altair, on the PC revolution, etc, very little about computing in Academia, AI research, once things got past the minicomputer era. I would have loved to get my hands on a Lisp Machine, or something out of MIT running ITS, but there was nary a mention of the symbolic-computing branch of computing history and AI research, which I felt was a little bit revisionist, given that AI needs drove the development of computing just as much as business needs.
file:~/org/data/41/0af40a-fe15-42db-9f02-5b23cf68fe8d/P9040276.JPG
file:~/org/data/41/0af40a-fe15-42db-9f02-5b23cf68fe8d/P9040277.JPG
file:~/org/data/41/0af40a-fe15-42db-9f02-5b23cf68fe8d/P9040278.JPG #+CAPTION: Xerox ALTO
file:~/org/data/41/0af40a-fe15-42db-9f02-5b23cf68fe8d/P9040279.JPG #+CAPTION: Xerox ALTO
file:~/org/data/41/0af40a-fe15-42db-9f02-5b23cf68fe8d/P9040290.JPG #+CAPTION: teletype in the cold room
file:~/org/data/41/0af40a-fe15-42db-9f02-5b23cf68fe8d/P9040289.JPG #+CAPTION: teletype in the cold room
file:~/org/data/41/0af40a-fe15-42db-9f02-5b23cf68fe8d/P9040285.JPG #+CAPTION: Shot, chaser
file:~/org/data/41/0af40a-fe15-42db-9f02-5b23cf68fe8d/P9040283.JPG #+CAPTION: Control Data 6500 in the cold room
