Visit to the Computer History Museum
One of members on my team also volunteers for the Computer History Museum as a docent in his free time and was kind enough to show us around!
Babbage Difference Engine #2 - veeeerry cool. Can calculate 7th order polynomials at a fairly decent rate! The story behind is rather amazing as well - Babbage designed the whole thing in the 19th century and drew up the specs but it wasn’t until 20 years ago that someone actually bothered to check out his design (wiki it for more info). We got to see a demonstration of it work and the precision of 8000? or so moving parts was simply beautiful.
A Enigma machine.
One of the original hard drives. Holds 10 MBs!
One of the original Google servers. Evidently the data center Larry and Sergey used billed them by the square footage of space, not the amount of power they drew, so they stuffed as many cpus as they could into a single rack (if you look closely you can tell it’s sagging xP).
Old school Kernighan and Ritchie
Original Windows! and a copy of Carmen Sandiego
A calcuator watch! Without the watch. (Just for you Chuan)
There was a ton of other nifty things there that I didn’t bother to take a picture of (Deep Blue, a prototype mouse, old Apple machines to name a few). I was also amazed at the stuff from my lifetime (Sony Playstation, the Palm Pilot) that can be counted as computer history (this industry moves so fast! obsolete is like 5 years). But yeah, very cool! Definitely recommend dropping by if you’re in the Bay area.
