for those on the Right Coast (where the Left Lives), Boston has a computer museum, too. may be the first, IIRC. haven’t been there in years.
I have fond memories of using a Hollerith hand-operated card punching machine at school.They were punched with Fortran IV code taken once a week to an ICL 1900 system 10 miles away, ran as a batch job, the output handed back to me the next day. If there were any errors I’d have to wait a week to run the program again.
So it seemed amazing when we got a Teletype with a paper tape reader/writer…
re:disinterested / uninterested
I know I’m a pedant but:
http://www.wsu.edu/~campbelld/engl402/confusedwords.htm
How much do you make off of amazon associates?
My Atari survived a flooded basement and still works perfectly to this day. They don’t make them like that anymore. If you sneeze on an X-Box, it will stop working.
I believe the cover photo is of an old Data General CPU. Can’t tell you the model but I am not happy that I remember working on those systems.
I skipped over this one. I’m a web developer. Even when solving database and application performance problems, I don’t have to think about the hardware. I need to think about the performance characteristics of algorithms, but I think a class like SICP is just as valid of a way to learn such things as an assembly class.
I’ve specialized in the software end of things. If a problem calls for hardware knowledge, I’ll learn what’s needed or, more likely, bring in some hardware expertise.
I am still nostalgic about the Apple II. I don’t currently have much of an interest in hardware, though.
Hey. Am I the only one here who still has the Nintendo Entertainment System as the newest gaming console, or are there other guys and girls with similar lack of new gaming consoles? 
I recently went out and bought a Yobo system to play my nintendo games. I loved TMNT II: the Arcade Game.
I’m interested in the underlying mathematics.
I’ve still got my original boat anchor IBM PC with a 64K motherboard. I thought I was the biggest gorilla in the neighborhood because I had a 256K card, TWO 5 1/4 inch floppy drives, MS Word that came on two floppies (coincidence?) and a mouse! Dang thing took about five minutes to boot up. Then I got my first hard drive – a whopping 5Mb! Unfortunately, it went into one of the 5 1/4 drive bays so I’ve since lost the floppy that came out of there. Oh well. I’m waiting for an offer from the Smithsonian.
Intergraph clipper?
I had one, it never went, had a 21" crt. That was a lot of screen back in the nineties. in fact, I had two. they are probably mulching at the local land fill.
Never mind.
Bob.
You should also check out Digital Retro by Gordon Laing. It’s got a ton of machines you never even knew existed. Good Stuff.
I just got this book from Amazon, and it’s great. Thanks for the recommendation! (I also have the Taschen “Computers, An Illustrated History” book on order, but it hasn’t arrived yet.)
The machine on the cover of Core Memory is indeed a DEC PDP 8/e. I started learning to program on one at school from 1975 to 1979, when we moved into the microcomputer age. Ours had 8 Kwords of, naturally, core memory.
The silver knob was used to choose between the different possible sources of blinking for a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/B/blinkenlights.html"das blinkenlights/a; a copy of “das blinkenlights” was pinned up next to the machine.
The learning is ongoing.
The Taschen book (Computers: An Illustrated History) arrived. The content is great, but the quality of the photo reproductions is disappointing. It’s definitely and noticeably a step below the other books in terms of print quality. Kind of a bummer.
I too work in an IT department and am preparing for a large amount of automation to be implemented into the system within the next couple of weeks. We had to replace our servers (http://www.computergiants.com) though because the old pc’s just where capable of running the new automation solutions or the company’s business software applications. We are transitioning the new servers in this week and should begin setting up network automation within the week after that. It’s actually got most of us really excited too since we are currently spending the majority of our day working on patches for all the bugs we encounter.
I love to learn so I’ve studied the history of computers. When they first appeared I told everyone they were the future. My first, I stole. It was an 4-bit, green monochrome screen, floppy driven pioneer. I think I saw that they and IBM were competing for dominance, kinda like Blue Ray and whatever lost to them. IBM was 8 bit and this was it’s competition. Hell, it worked. Luckilly I was wise enough to steal the disks too so I taught myself by putting in discs and hitting buttons. I finally had to put it to rest when the keyboard quit working. I can’t remember what brand it was but it taught me how to type. I found a good site to see the chronological history of computers @ http://www.99er.net/hist1.html
When I went to prison the second time I took computer programming in about 1978, back when back up drives were cassettes, but my hobbies included selling drugs, extortion and murder so I barely finished the algebra part before I was back in Super Max. When I got out I scored a Commodore 64 which was the S***. I thought I’d seen the future. Well, around 2004-2005 I went back to college and took micro processing classes and PC maintenance and repair so I build my own computers out of old peices of junk people give me.
Anyways, It’s nice to see others who love the computer as much as me and want to know more about it besides it’s great for letters, Googling stuff I don’t know, and porn.
As I was searching for the name of my first computer I came across a much better history site on the evolution of micro-processing. The site I cited before was mostly TI history but this one takes you through the years from 69’. http://www.islandnet.com/~kpolsson/comphist/comp1969.htm
Jeff, the matter is actually quite simple - to his own extent of interest.
The same notion can be applied that since we are so interested in using computing hardware we perhaps should learn about Logic Gates, or better, Electronic Engineering that makes it all possible. Maybe we should then exhibit concern and interest in the physics of electricity. You get my drift.
Each person has a finite amount of time to spend and has to decide which layer_of_abstraction he should just be ignore and let be. Encapsulation does not apply to OO programming alone. 
But I can guess which angle you are approaching with that statement - the unhealthy nonchalance with details that can have significant influence in the way we carry out our work. For me, I’d rather have developers gain interest in the workings of CLR and IL first before worrying about hardware operations. It perturbs me greatly to see developers churning away years of code without realising what they are in reality telling the CLR to execute.
Correction, the statement should be read as, “to each his own…”
Weird find of the day…
Google’s “revolutionary” server model at work by IBM circa 1958: http://old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1c=1050
Tell me the shopping cart reference doesn’t sound like a lot of descriptions of big G’s server areas?