Benford Does Stuff

Visited the Computer History Museum recently in San Jose, California, and the results were quite epic. To summarize, It was like looking through the combined Attic and Garage of the entire Silicon Valley. If all we wanted was a twitter post, my work would end here, but I have far more in store.

I’ll start with one of the most impressive pieces. This museum, with personal sponsorship from a top Microsoft Executive, was able to build a functional Babbage Machine, based on the Babbage’s original designs. Back in the day, such conveniences as gear ratios and standardized threadcounts did not exist, making the original Babbage machine an unmitigated impossibility at the time. With modern tools and technology, we finally were able to construct a true steampunk computer. Though lacking in steam, it’s powered by a hand crank and is mostly made of brass. It even could export to multiple formats: paper and printing plate. This way, the machine could directly print numbers in calculation books without the need to manually typeset numbers, eliminating yet another opportunity for operator errors to appear in books. Now we’re just fighting over XML and JSON. This was true multi-publishing. One must ponder upon the 1800’s equivalent of an MS Word Document. Probably chicken fat burned onto a slab of scrap metal.

At one point this was the most effective way to solve polynomials

After seeing this, I have suddenly appreciated my TI graphing calculator much more. They had a live demo in which Polynomials were solved by turning gears to the correct spot.

Moving on to slightly more modern times, a retail copy of Microsoft Windows (first version). Key features include a clock, and at least a moderate ability to be better than a DOS prompt sometimes. It wasn’t long after this one that they figured out how to draw overlapping windows.

The "Better than Vista" sticker confused MS employees for almost 20 years

Before the fruit-flavored computing companies laugh too much at the above example, here is one of the very first Apple Computers:

"Grapefruit" was rejected early in the design stages

The Apple computer kit was just the big green board near the top. Early Apple fans had to provide their own keyboard, mouse, power supply, video interface, and monitor in order to get their kicks. Makes lack of Blu-ray player BTO options seem not so bad, doesn’t it?

Of course, no tour of early computing would be complete without the first Xerox workstations. They sported a vertically oriented monitor, which makes sense when you want to eventually make paper documents. To this day I’m unsure why every monitor is horizontally oriented. I blame TV.

Ironically, everyone copied Xerox

These workstations also sported the world’s first WIZIWIG GUI, complete with windows and a desktop and a mouse cursor, among other things. Eventually a couple Jobs caught wind of this, and so did others, and the rest is history. Xerox hasn’t made a computer in 20 years, but they’re still selling copiers just fine, so they weren’t doomed by the paperless office anyway.

The true highlight of the tour for me was seeing a working IBM 1401 Business Computer. The entire setup, including several punchcard printing terminals, a printer, two magnetic tape drives (12 MB a piece), the computer itself, and the punchcard reader took up an entire room.

The days of real computing, when men were men, women were women, and a syntax error could easily blow out 145 fuses

The best part about this is that the machine was staffed with volunteer operators who ran the machine in the height of their careers. It was really fun hearing their stories and explanations of how the whole system worked.

600 Lines per minute; pager per minute is just a cop-out

The printer had ~27 wires connected between it and the computer. One wire per character, and another to switch to control codes (such as carriage return and line feed; line feed, as it might sound, actually fed a new line into the printer).

The trip would not be complete without a personal touch however. I was invited to write some input punch cards to actually run a program on this behemoth! I carefully put my name on one card, and the current date on another. The operator put these two cards underneath a big stack of cards labeled “BANNER”, and separated the two stacks with a control card, so that the system could distinguish my input from the program itself.

My typing was more accurate as I realized that each keypress punched a hole in a piece of paper

Here, we can see the origins of KDE

Above is the control panel that I was looking at while the program ran. Lights blinked on and off as assembly instructions rattled off, card by card. Vi seems so tame by comparison. Eventually I was the lucky owner of a banner proudly proclaiming “Benford visited the Computer Museum on November 25th, 2009″, immortalizing me for all history.

Full sized images are available within the gallery below: