Being a computer scientist and a geek, I was ecstatic to find out that there was a Computer History Museum in Mountain View which is near to Palo Alto. It is the largest computer history museum in the world, so I decided to go there today to have a visit. The cost to get in is free, which is great, but the museum operates with generous donations and from sponsors and donors, like Bill and Melinda Gates who contributed 15 million dollars to the museum.
I went on a tour of the Visible Storage exhibit which was the only tour that they had, since they're doing renovations on the other exhibits. There is also a virtual visible storage tour as well which you can find here. The Visible Storage exhibit showcases all the history of the computer. I saw the Hollerith machine which Herman Hollerith used for the US census, the ENIAC, the EDVAC, UNIVAC, the IBM 360 and IBM's early mainframe computers, the Jacquard loom, Charles Babbage's Difference Engine, the Zuse computer, the Cray supercomputers, Xerox PARC's Alto computer, the first laser printer made by Xerox which was created by Xerox PARC, are just some of the many things that I saw. It was really cool and amazing to see the things that I read about and studied during high school about computers, and see the actual machines physically. It's amazing how the museum was able to grab all these artifacts. What's even more amazing is that they got a PDP-1 computer (made by DEC) and restored it and actually have it working to play a game (however, they didn't have it running when I was there today).
It's also cool to see the stuff that Xerox PARC did in the heydays when they were mighty and revolutionized the computer industry during the 80's. And a lot of computer scientists that revolutionized the computer industry and paved the way towards computers today, worked at PARC like Alan Kay and Mark Weiser. The docent who gave the tour explained about the history of each artifact, it's quite amazing how much knowledge he was able to explain. Apparently, talking to him afterwards, he said that some of the artifacts are on loan from the Smithsonian Institute or from other museums, and the rest are donated (for example, some of the stuff was donated from Gordon Bell (who worked on DEC's PDP-6 and is now a Microsoft Researcher working on MyLifeBits which is a project to archive and record everything in your life, and make it easy to search, retrieve and annotate, to achieve the vision of the Memex by Vannevar Bush).
It was just awe inspiring to be in the presence of all the historical machines, the precursors to the Internet and the computers that we have today. What was really cool, was that I saw the first server that Google used, now that was cool! The Visible Storage also showed the evolution of calculators and mobile computing, with the first notebooks and handhelds, yes the Apple Newton and the Palm Pilot. In fact, I bought a video of the PalmPilot story which was a discussion with the 3 original founders of Palm, Jeff Hawkins, Donna Dubinsky and Ed Colligan (and I just finished watching it tonight). It's just amazing how Palm started and how much work was involved on the part of Jeff Hawkins to realize his dream of a Palm handheld, how so many people thought he would fail (cause every other company did, witness Apple's Newton, it was way ahead of its time but it didn't catch on).
After the Visible Storage exhibit, I went to go see a History of Computer Chess, an exhibit showcasing the origins of the dream of building a computer and software for chess that could beat a human. The exhibit showed how computer programs play chess, how they use algorithms to compute all the possible moves and then select the best one. Until May 11, 1997, no computer could beat the best chess player. Of course May 11, 1997 was the day when the chess grandmaster Gary Kasparov was beaten by IBM's Deep Blue (the computer built for playing chess). PC chess software can now play chess just like IBM's Deep Blue which is simply amazing.
After the chess exhibit, I went to see the Innovations 101, a celebration of Silicon Valley companies and pioneers. There I saw the beginnings of Apple Computer, PARC, Sun Microsystems, Adobe Systems, Intel, HP (and Hewlett and Packard's famous garage where they started the company and started the HP Way), and Palm.
If you're in the Bay Area, you must go see the Computer History museum. And if you're not, you can also visit the exhibit virtually online and can see the photos and exhibit information.
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