Beautiful computers: The Difference Engine

This weekend we all went to the Computer History Museum in Mountainview. Take a look at my photos of some of the computers if you want a little history and nostalgia! They have a working Difference Engine, one of only two in the world.

I have added to my vague fantasy of my future bookstore/cafe/laundromat/junk shop. Now it contains a Cray:

Stylish!

I remember reading about these and drooling over them when I was a kid - reading Omni or Discover or Scientific American.

Check out the gorgeous design of the KL10. There's something about the cool colors and the way they continue from button to casing - and the very clean font:

My imaginary bookstore cafe will also need a SAGE Weapons Director 2 (as directed by my friend Yatima's daughter:

Secretly ... I want to be a set builder for some show like Dr. Who or Blake's 7 and make amazing fake computers with blinky lights and complicated "futuristic" control panels!

This stuff is so much better -- being real.

It was disappointing that the Difference Engine exhibit didn't have any mention of Ada Lovelace. What's the point of leaving her out? How annoying. We brought her up, and the astronomer Caroline Herschel, during the demonstration (which mentioned her brother). Then the speaker talked enthusiastically about Lovelace. So why not put some information and a photo of her? And Herschel too. Instead, we got a dumb wisecrack/excuse about how women didn't do much math back then. (Hummm. What is the point of that? Why not mention the ones who did? Mary Somerville for example, who taught Lovelace.)

I wish there were more working models of older computers we could actually use. I can see that it would be way too much work to maintain that, though. Inspiration for me to fire up my Mac Plus or an old Commodore 64 maybe!

It was so glorious... I also felt like anyone else who had bothered to go to this museum was probably very cool and a kindred spirit... people were walking around grinning hugely or gawping in awe like a cathedral. (Which it is.) All those PDPs and VAXes and the IMP, and amazing calculators from 1899 or 1920 like the Millionaire and the Comptometer. The chess exhibit was good too. All the excitement of REAL AUTOMATED COMPUTERS that play chess, all the excitement and conviction that the future would be AMAZING -- all came flooding back to me. I wanted to hug the IMP and just sort of commune with it and say a little prayer or something, like I felt when I saw very new lava, or the tallest tree in the world, or something else I have loved abstractly, imagined, and then seen for real.