Visiting the Computer History Museum

Wed, Dec 28, 2011

This blog has been quiet for a while…

Real life has a habit of taking over during the holiday season.
New work project - getting up to speed on Android programming.
… yes, I have been playing skyrim.

So I haven’t had much time to write for a while.

However, I did get a very nice break over christmas where I went down to California and managed to finally visit the Computer History Museum - Yes, I am a geek, this is a technical blog, deal with it!

I really, really enjoyed the visit. I had almost the full day, but I wish I had a few more hours - I’ll have to plan a second trip. The museum is very well organized, although I wasn’t always 100% sure I was going in a chronological direction.

Most of the museum is dedicated to the main exhibition Revolution - The First 2000 Years of Computing, taking us through from the Abacus to the World Wide Web:

Calculators
Punched Cards
Analog Computers
Birth of the Computer
Early Computer Companies
Real Time Computing
Mainframe Computers
Memory & Storage
The Art of Programming
Supercomputers
Minicomputers
Digital Logic
Artificial Intelligence & Robots
Input & Output
Computer Graphics, Music, and Art
Computer Games
Personal Computers
Mobile Computing
Networking
The Web

I grew up with personal computers in the 80’s, 90’s and beyond, and I’ve read a lot about what I (used to) think of as computing history… Xerox parc, Doug Engelbart and Ivan Sutherland, Homebrew Computer Club and early Apple and Microsoft days… and I went in expecting mostly personal computer stuff, but I now realise that there is much, much more to computing history than just the personal computer.

I mean, of course, I knew of the Babbage Engine, the Eniac, Enigma, Collosus and Cray and such, (not to mention the Abacus and the Slide Rule), but I hadn’t really put them into context until wandering (in chronological order!) through the museum, and it was really fascinating.

I also really enjoyed seeing some of the computers I grew up with, the Commodore64, ZX Spectrum, Amiga, SpeakNSpell, Little Professor… and of course the games, Pong, Atari, PacMan, Infocom…

I have only a few, very very minor negatives:

Coverage is broad, but not necessarily deep - the nature of museums.
As a software guy, I thought programming was a bit short changed.
Wish the store had a larger selection of books.
They have an awesome programming languages chart on the wall, but not available to purchase (yet).

Even so, I highly recommend any self respecting computer geek taking a day out to go visit in person, or even just online:

Here are some photo’s of the bits that stood out for me (in no particular order):