Computer History

When we were kids, nobody outside of a few academics and government types had heard of "computers".  Suddenly, now, they deserve their own Museum!

We pushed on to Pacifica, south of San Francisco. On the way, we stopped the coach at the south end of the big bay and strolled into the Museum of Computer History. Before Debbie had stopped his travel planning, this was almost the only attraction the West Coast had had for John. That, and the La Brea Tar Pits in LA. But he learned those were downtown and his brother had explained it was like everything else in LA: oversold, overrated, overpriced, and overrun by the homeless who may be dirty and diseased (if you follow the ultraConservative "news"), but who are being courted for their Democrat votes.  Dreams die hard, especially the ones engendered by the dinosaur books read as a ten year old, dreams that had rolled around in his head for sixty years. So John visited the website, looked at Google's Street View and decided he's had enough of LA. Really.
Besides, he'd known for many decades that there are no dinosaur bones in the Pits. Never were. And, Saber Tooth Tigers pale next to visions of T. Rex.

The computer museum starts with humankind's first attempt at calculating after having learned the basics, like how to count. The abacus was not the only primitive device. But the technology quickly moved on to more sophisticated machines, through the mechanical gears and cogs that were so very limited, until diodes were built as the vacuum tubes that John used while a young teen with his ham radios. Transistors were just coming into the consumer market in high school (the kid with the transistorized(!) radio in his pocket(!) kept the classroom disorganized during the World Series with score updates in the late 60s). John built a couple digital meters from scratch when the first TTL chips hit the consumer market, but by then it was the early 70s, he was married and out of college with a B.A. in English. How did that advance his interest in electronics?

Answer: it didn't. Until 1980, that is, when he realized that computers were the key to information assembly, organization, and distribution. The Radio station that had hired him as News Director allowed him enough freedom to explore. In 1980, with the help of the husband of one of his newsroom employees, WCUZ became the first Radio station in West Michigan –and possibly the state-- to gather local election returns electronically. Working with the Kent County Clerk, Maury DeJonge, John learned just how detailed and intricate the job of simply counting and reporting the votes was. When you see the numbers flash by the screens these days, understand that thousands of man-hours had gone into setting up the systems and pathways that get all that to you.

And there, in front of us, was the same Heathkit model computer, with no visual display and only a hexadecimal keypad input, that Scott Martin had used to perform that magic for us  in 1980!

By 1983, John'd gotten a Sinclair ZX-80 of his own, just a toy, but a serious one at fifty 1980 dollars. With it he learned how the internal systems worked by writing really simple games that arranged black'n'white dots on the living room TV screen. They had one there in the museum! John's is still in a tin box in the basement somewhere. He bets it would still work if you could take the time to find power and a cassette recorder to play back his programming tapes.

That morphed into a Commodore-64 –and they had one there!


His employer allowed him to build the first-ever paperless newsroom in the state (using a commercially available BASYS system) and we produced our newscast scripts right onto the screens in the studio for years before the entire Radio industry was consumed from the inside by a huge big-box named Clear Channel.  CC was slow climbing onto the digital bandwagon, but when it did, it had the resources (and the Internet had grown capable enough) to allow news readers (not reporters) to “do the news” for listeners in other parts of America the reader didn't even know how to pronounce. The concept of Local News gathering and reporting these days is lost in the gigantic corporate accounting whirlpool in what was renamed iHeart Media and that's why John chose to wander Western America these months shy of his 70^th birthday instead of working up to the Social Security deadline.

He was gratified to see Debbie again actively wonder how a simple on-off switch could grow into an entire computer. She spent several minutes playing with an interactive AND/OR/NOT display and remembering her enjoyment of flow charts in her one computer class in college, reminding John of his own hours puzzling it out decades ago without the benefit of classroom instruction. "But how does that become a whole computer?!" wails Debbie, not grasping.  John cannot grasp, either, although he knows that one grain of sand --multiplied-- can become the Sahara Desert.  Even today, he has trouble comprehending that trillions of such circuits are built inside the teensy chips inside each computer, tablet, and smart phone. Literally.  It's true.  And it's totally beyond grasping.

Seeing the old IBM punch card machines reawakened memories of his college exposure to computing and the museum even had a working model of the original hard drive, a RAMAC 350.

The first hard drive.  Really.

A couple dozen platters were stacked three feet high to hold an astounding five megaBytes of data, yet it allowed the total freedom of random access rather than waiting for the magnetic tape to spool along.

John recently replaced a hard drive in his desktop computer that had capacity for two TeraBytes of random access storage.  It used the same spinning disk technology as the old RAMAC.  The new replacement, also a 2TB drive, is totally solid state with a gazillion NAND gates performing the same function more quickly and with less power draw.

And all this is less than our lifetimes!  This was a museum of our lives!   We spent two hours there and it was not enough. But we had to get to Pacifica to set up camp.