Nuts & Volts - July 2005

Micro Memories

floor reception area with several exhibits. “Shakey,” the pioneering mobile robot built by the Valley’s SRI industries who was featured in the September 2004 Micro Memories, is housed in a Plexiglas case there, along with the first Ethernet cable, the first disk drive (which looks to be over three feet in diameter — unlike the device that fits into the 5-1/4” drive bay in your PC, and early Apple Is and Macintoshes, each also similarly protected by Plexiglas. The increased space has also allowed for a larger staff, which has grown from three at the beginning of the Moffett days to 26, currently.

Off to one side is the new version of what the museum calls “The Visible Storage Facility.” At 10,000 square feet, it’s much larger than its Quonset hut predecessor. It contains the same pieces of “Big Iron” featured in the July 2001 Nuts & Volts article, including a hulking Johniac and Air Force Sage mainframes from the 1950s; early IBM mainframes; the sleek but useless Neiman-Marcus “kitchen computer” from the 1960s; and a NASA Apollo guidance computer. More recent computers include a row of stylish Cray mainframes; several cases’ worth of 1970s and ‘80s PCs and their accompanying software; Google’s first server farm; and numerous early pocket calculators, robots and even stand-up coin-op videogames from the 1970s.

“It’s quite different from the

The entrance to the Visible Storage Facility.

Johniac mainframes from the 1950s.

Visible Storage facility that was over in Moffett,” Toole is quick to mention. “Now, we’ve got about 10,000 square feet. We do docent-led tours there every Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday afternoons, which are open to the public. The Visible Storage area only houses ten percent of our collection, but it’s an up-close and personal view of the artifacts, but now there are labels there — unlike what we had at Moffett back in the old days!”

sworn to secrecy), this warehouse is crammed full of technology — everything from fin-de-siecle stock tickers to at least eight Altair 8080s, to a good half dozen TRS- 80 Model IIIs, and all points in between.

Another room, closer to the lobby, has a sign on its door that announces that it is the “PDP-1

Visiting the Museum

Beyond Visible Storage

But the Visible Storage Facility is merely the tip of the museum’s iceberg. In the back of the reception hall is another storage facility, normally closed to the public, that resembles the vast warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, except that rather than the Ark of the Covenant (at least, I don’t think this museum has that — if they do, they’re clearly

The Computer History Museum is located at:

1401 North Shoreline Blvd. Mountain View, CA 94043 Tel: 650-810-1010 Fax: 650-810-1055 Email: info@computerhistory.org Web: www.computerhistory.org