After lunch, Jeffrey and I drove up the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. While museums in general are interesting, this one is especially so now as it has one of only 2 ever made Babbage Difference Engine Number 2. More on that later.
This humble display has some amazing fire power in it. The
cable and orange boxes on it are the original Ethernet system,
develop at Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Centre). The
people
are the shakers and movers of PARC, whose contributions went
far beyond "mere" networking.
A Xerox PARC
Alto.
Though you have likely never heard of it, this is the original
windows machine. It's later incarnations are Macintosh and Windows
computers, among others. All of these ideas developed at PARC,
in conjunction with Ethernet.
As the Alto was intended as a paper replacement (remember the
"paperless office"?), its screen was portrait oriented, as opposed
to the majority of today's being landscape (though some rotate).
The diagram on the wall illustrates the capability of the graphics
of the Alto, which was one of its major improvements - others at
the time were text, or very simple block graphics, only.
This is the PDP-1 restoration project. The PDP-1 (Programmed Digital
Processor) was Digital Equipment Corporation's first in a long line
of computer systems. The photo in the background looks to be from
the production line (or perhaps development lab) in one of DEC's
New England facilities - mostly old spinning mills.
This three-rotor version is capable of generating 150,000,000,000,000,000,000 different code combinations by using spare rotors in different orders, varying the initial positions, and changing the plugs on the front.
The pulley on the right of the photo is part of the Colussus machine built by the British at Bletchley Park to break the Enigma code (mostly by brute force). Sadly, at the end of the war, the Colussus machines were destroyed. They are considered the first electronic computer, albeit of limited functionality - to break the Enigma code of the day.
The label on the top of this box says it all:
RAID II Prototype (FrankenRAID), 1993.
RAID - Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks - was an idea to improve
the reliability of data storage by using many inexpensive disks,
and arranging the data on them such that a single disk failure
does not result in data loss. A clever idea from The University
of California, Berkeley. Now widely used wherever redundancy is
deemed important. Even the original of this web page, and its
photos, is stored on a RAID - II system.
As an aside, this was donated by Murray Allen, former head of the Computer Science Department at UNSW, and my thesis supervisor - way back when.
The Cray-1 was a really fast machine in its day. These days, many
video cards would put it to shame, but then 20 years in the computer
world is a very long time. The vertical parts are the compuer
proper, and if memory serves me correctly, there was cooling liquid
circulating through those parts. Beneath the "seat" are things
such as power supplies.
The plaque records this particular machine as having been donated to the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's Computer Center Museum on July 25th, 1989! It's serial number 6.
Morning Bike Ride
Computer History Museum II
Reunions