Washington D.C. Trip

From: Jason McBrien <jbmcb_at_hotmail.com>
Date: Wed May 30 12:57:30 2001

Didn't get anything from anywhere on my extended Memorial Day vacation to
Washington D.C. (Mostly running through museums) But I highly reccomend it
to anyone interested in historical computing devices. The main Smithsonian
museums I went to were the American History Museum and the Air and Space
museum. Both had special exhibits on information processing, and among the
highlights are:

American History Museum "The History of Information Processing"
- An old mechanical logarithm calculator the size of a prone refrigerator
- Two original German Enigma machines, the three-rotor and four-rotor
models. These were
  AWESOME, and all the true hax0rs stood around them in awe.
- The accumulators, main control pannel, power supplies and I/O tube grid
from the Eniac.
- A UNIVAC control unit.
- The MANIAC main processor unit (HUGE box)
- A Bendix mainframe, tape drive, and typewriter terminal
- An old tube-based IBM mainframe with drum hard drive
- An IBM/360 control unit.
- A DEC PDP/8 with transparent card cage
- A DEC PDP/15, the first computer used for fingerprint analysis by the FBI
- A Xerox Altos, the machine Jobs & Woz "Borrowed" From, with a strange
image
  screen-burned into the monitor.
- Bugs taken from the DNC offices in the Watergate Building (Removed for
"Further Study" :)
-Various TI and HP calculators, 60's to 70's vintage, and a Pulsar watch
(The first digital watch)
- An Altair 8800, the original Apple I prototype model, and a Sol computer
- A TRS-80 I, an IBM PC, Commodore 64 (Late vintage it looks) a Sun-I
Workstation, and a Mac,
all propped up on stacks of old Byte, Computerworld, and Misc. other
magazines
- Various other nick-nacks, like an original Mac system disk and brochure
(If you can point, you can use a Mac) A HomeBrew Computer Club sweatshirt on
a mannequin that a French couple mistook for Steve Jobs (I'm pretty sure he
isn't, and has never been, of Asian descent. :) The camera used to broadcast
the first televised Presidential debate, bunches of other stuff I've
forgotten..

Air and Space Museum "Computers and Flight"
-A Cray 1, S/N 0014. Installed at the Goddard space center, I belive.
-Processor modules from an old model space shuttle (Can you say -
over-engineering?)
-Processor modules from the Iridium (defunct) system
-A MicroVAX II (I have one! Horray!)
-The slide rule Goddard used (Really classic computing :)
-An ANCIENT IBM mini that I couldn't recognize. It's panels were off.
- The last remaining piece of Sputnik; the pin used to keep the battery
contacts of the transmitter open, pulled just before launch to activate the
transmitter.

Also, if you drive out to Rockville, a suburb of D.C., you can drive through
this technology park and see Celera and the Human Genome Project, both
within a mile of each other..
Received on Wed May 30 2001 - 12:57:30 BST