Re: Just for DrFranken

But have you seen the Babbage Engine running there? It is a fully mechanical computer and it is friggin awesome! To use it you crank it and you MUST be at a very very specific speed, it's in the design. The docent there who demonstrates it then pulls out his iPhone, starts his metronome and then literally 'cranks up' a 150 year old computer design. Sure the machine itself is barely over a decade old but it's built exactly to spec and it works!

All in all the museum is a MUST SEE for any computer geek. They also have the Watson set from Jeopardy there and MANY other cool things.

- Larry "DrFranken" Bolhuis

www.Frankeni.com
www.iDevCloud.com - Personal Development IBM i timeshare service.
www.iInTheCloud.com - Commercial IBM i Cloud Hosting.

On 9/23/2016 6:40 PM, James H. H. Lampert wrote:

On 9/23/16, 3:18 PM, Paul Nelson wrote:

Hey, it's Friday afternoon, and the oldest government computers have been
located. And yup, they were built by IBM. No wonder dealing with the
IRS is
so slow.

https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2016/sep/23/governments-oldest-comput

er-isnt-technically-compu/

http://tinyurl.com/hcmocaa

Note, however, that if you try to open that URL in a Firefox as recent
as 17.0.1, it's going to curl up its toes and squeak "helllllppppp
meeeeeeee!!!!" I had to open it in Chrome in order to see it, and for an
article on superannuated systems, there is NO EXCUSE FOR IT NOT OPENING
IN MOSAIC, OR EVEN IN LYNX!

Be that as it may, I can add that the Computer History Museum (in
Mountain View, CA) has a DEC PDP-1 and an IBM 1401, BOTH RESTORED TO
FULL WORKING ORDER, as well as a RAMAC hard drive, also restored to full
working order (and accessed from a demonstration program running on a
notebook), and they have a regular schedule of demonstrations:

IBM 1401: every Wednesday at 3:00 PM, and every Saturday at 11:00 AM
PDP-1: 1st and 3rd Saturdays of the month, at 2:30 PM and 3:15 PM
RAMAC: every Wednesday at 2:00 PM.

--
JHHL