My walk around the Computer History Museum...

While in San Francisco, I paid a visit to the computer museum there - for the uninitiated, an amazing collection of odds and ends from the history of computing, from the abacus right up to the first Google server rack and beyond. Let's dispense with the talking and get right down to it. I should point out, though, these shots aren't in any particular order - everything in the musem was scattered around in a pretty haphazard fashion...



This is a shot of a German Enigma machine. There was no wall mounted plaque thingy saying what those dials were, but I'm guessing they could be used to change the cipher in the machine or something. And I don't care if I'm using the word "cipher" incorrectly. Or if I'm wrong about the internal workings. There was a film made about this which was probably historically accurate. Well, apart from the fact that all the English people were replaced by Americans.


This ugly monstrosity was used (as you might have expected) to blow stuff up. Sporting a sexy IBM logo, the big square thing is connected to the big metal thing behind it (technical term) which hooks into that long control panel to the left, there. It comes complete with emergency telephone, presumably to tell the President it's all gone tits up. Apparently IBM were given something like 13 Billion dollars to churn these things out, which was back in in 1954. SAGE (Semi-Automatic Ground Environment), we salute you.

Eventually, it became too expensive to make the tubes for these things so the States had to import them in from countries they were actually at war with. Smooth moves!


The picture sucks, but only because they put this thing in a really stupid place. It's an absolutely huge hard drive...size-wise, it comes up to your waist and allows you to jam a monolithic 13MB onto it.

Unfortunately, I didn't see a label thing anywhere that said what year this was from.






One of about thirty data racks from the first Google data center. It probably still has your first ever search for boobies and dancing hamsters on it.



















A Unix licence plate.















I had the basketball game to the right. I'm betting you had some of these, too. Damn you, car boot sale!









The Cray 1-A Supercomputer, and a cooling tower which looks more like an ant farm. Lots of words like Gigaflop and Megaspank abound on the cards next to them (though I made Megaspank up).


















































The first ever Apple Mac, signed by the Woz himself.

















The Atari 2600 prototype. You may weep.














An Apple Mac from 1984. I don't know about you, but I preferred the original one above.














According to the blurb, this isn't Deep Blue, but they did base the chess-master beating monster on this one.




















A Blue Box. Oooh, haxxorish.



















God Damn, these Apples just keep getting uglier...

















A first edition copy of Windows. It probably doesn't work.




















The Altair 8800. Ask your dad. Or look here.











An Amiga 1000, from 1986. I also got a picture of a Commodore +4, but I got all nostalgic and am unable to put it on the site, for fear of crying like a little sissy every time I see it.







..on second thoughts, to Hell with it. My first ever computer, and it danced all over a C16. I don't care what you say ;)












There was no label anywhere for this, but it looks cool and I want one. If you know what it is / does, feel free to let me know in the comments.
















A final shot of another Cray, mainly because I just found this on a spare SD Card. Whoops. Nice looking thing, though.













...and that's pretty much everything. I have some other shots, but they're mostly pictures of cars and random people in the street. Hope you liked your brief tour - if you like the look of the place, why not check it out if you're anywhere near San Fran?