Categories
Thoughts

When you see your life in a museum

Computer History Museum

If you ever find yourself in Mountain View with a spare hour or so, you really should visit the Computer History Museum. It’s a little strange seeing the computers you have used on museum shelves… guess thats a sign of getting old.

Sinclair trio

Great to see the Brits’s represented by the trio of Sinclair machines, including my first personal computer the ZX Spectrum of 1982 !!

As a Apple Fan boy, of course I was impressed by the Apple 1 and the blue box which was the first “technology” developed by the two Steves and illegal ( it was used to get free long-distance phone calls) !!

The VAX

Also represented a Vax minicomputer which was my first experience of computer mapping using GIMMS,MAPICS and SYMAP – yes I used SYMAP once upon a time !!!

Fast forward to today, I’m this evening going to the Ignite meeting part of the Where 2.0 conference to see the very latest innovative business ideas for using geospatial information and processes – this is an industry which moves very quickly but it’s good to see an organisation documenting and preseving this progress.

Now I must dust of my Apple Newton when I get home….

Written and submitted from the Marriott Residence Inn, Mountain View using the hotels free wifi network

8 replies on “When you see your life in a museum”

Did I really shell out £450 for a BBC Model B back in 1983? And did it really only have 32K of memory 18K of which was gobbled up by the OS.. and a grand total of 16 colours? And I did really fork out £170 for a 40 track (100K I think) single sided disk drive?

There’s a great computer museum inside Bletchley Park (which is well worth a visit on its own).

http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/content/visit/attractions.rhtm

The best thing about the Bletchley Park museum is that all the machines are up and running with the latest and greatest titles of the time, including Pong on the Binatone, Sabotage on the ZX81, Trans Am on the Spectrum and Elite on the BBC. Be warned attending the computer museum with your disinterested wife can cause major marital problems 😉

Ian

Quote – Ed Said:

“BBC computer you were lucky, we dreamed of having a BBC..”

Could there be a Monty Python sketch in the makings here?

Our family were so t’ut poor we couldn’t afford a computer so us Dad used to thieve owt copy of PC World off t’ut newstand stand and cut picture out of 4.77MHz IBM PC and stick it on’t wall..

(‘Comicbookman’ -.. worst Yorkshire accent ever…)

I have owned 2 out of 3 of those models of Sinclair – Spending many happy hours as a kid, writing reams of code for it to play something as simple as a nursery rhyme… or games on cassette – I’m sure we all remember those graphics! That was the early 80’s; and where are we now? Google Earth, Local Live and 3D-fly-throughs.

Gone are the days of the Acorn PC and the 5 1/4″ floppy drive, now we have Dual-Core machines and data formats (RSS, GML, XML…) that are best described using acronyms!

wow – I’m feeling old now too – I remember you using the Apple Newton around the university.

Add a comment?

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.