Bozeman's American Computer & Robotoics Museum

Little, ole Bozeman, Montana, truly a city off the beaten path (unless you're crossing Montana on I-90) boasts one of the finest museums on the history of semiconductors (the invention & development of transistors & integrated circuits), computers (both mainframe & personal), consumer electronics and robotics.

Ironically, their website is as underwhelming as the museum itself is fantastic.  I'm hesitant to even send you there.  Oh, what the hell, here it is:  ACRM

I'm going to pass on the robotics, not part of my interest.

For the rest of it, I've been struggling for days trying to map out a post.  I even went back for more pics.

On one hand, the museum traces the evolution of electronics from tubes to transistors to integrated circuits.  But the presentation is both spectacular and uneven.

The same for computers, starting with the ENIAC up through the Apollo 11 system.

And the PC, from the Altair 8800 to the Apple II & beyond.

For software, the museum takes you from Ada Lovelace past Mr. Hollerith & his marvelous punch cards to compilers & COBOL.  (In the early '60's back at the university we threw those IBM cards away by the hundreds but at this museum store, they'll cost you 50¢ each.)

So rather than strictly tripping through history, I'm going to post some pics from here & there, but emphasize that if you're ever in the area, you gotta visit this place.  BTW, it's free but relies heavily on donations.

The invention of the transistor marks the beginning of the age of real electronics and the fulfillment of the 100 year old dream of developing a practical computer.  The invention of the integrated circuit and the refinement of putting a computer & computer memory on a chip cinched it.  Now both desktop and mainframe computers became practical.

What's wonderful about the museum is that it has the support of the scientists and the industry so many of the exhibits are the real deal, like this panel.

Fundamental to any computer is the basic unit of information called a bit.  It can exist in one of only two states, commonly called 1 & 0 (zero).  From the storage and manipulation of millions & billions of bits, computers do their work.

But it is fascinating to see what it takes, electronic component-wise, to produce one bit using emerging technology.  Note the very short time span to make the transition.

In the early '60's the integrated circuit was invented and from that, the microprocessor.

The museum does a wonderful job of tracing the evolution of the PC, the personal computer.  Here are the early guys.

Maybe the reason I resonate with the museum is that I lived this.  I remember lusting for the Altair but it was $600 or $800 in 1975 and & had just left secure employment to start a company with two other ex-Motorolans & was living off savings.

My new business was looking for companies to represent in Japan.  I was living in Bethel, Connecticut and in the summer of 1976, there was a Computer Faire (they loved fancy spellings) on the Boardwalk in Atlantic City, NJ, a few hours away.  So I piled the family into the car & headed off.  While they were on the beach, I was inside perusing the display tables.  I came upon the Apple table and behind it was Steve Jobs, an ordinary, hippyish looking kinda guy flogging the Apple I, a fully functioning computer processing unit in board form, featuring color output.  I introduced myself, he explained the system & I suggested representing him in Japan.  We agreed it was a bit (more than a bit, actually) premature but we should keep in touch.

(As it turned out, the Apple I as a board was impractical for the consumer market and was quickly followed by the Apple II in a case with a keyboard.  The former faded into total obscurity.)

Over the next 10 years, the PC was developed & sold by many companies.  Here are the early ones.

On the left middle shelf is the Altair 8800 (grey case with blue trim) and below it is the Apple II.  In the middle at the top (with the red Verbatim floppy disk) is the Kaypro with its detachable keyboard, my first PC.  It came standard with a built-in modem, at the less than blazing speed of 300 characters per second...so slow you could watch the words form on the screen.  Back then I paid $2,100.

Below it is the Radio Shack TRS-80 & below that is the Commodore PET.  To the right of the PET is the Apple Macintosh.

Before we leave computer hardware & move on to software, one more shot, dear to me cuz I lived it.  The Control Data Corp. PDP-8.

In 1973, I left Motorola Semiconductors in Phoenix to join a very small company in Danbury, CT that manufactured semiconductor test equipment.  Their top-of-the-line system featured  mini-computer control, first the PDP-8, then the PDP-11, but in those days, still with core memory.

Having just left Motorola, I told the engineering folks in the new company that the emerging microprocessor would make these CDC computers obsolete, which it did.

OK, on to software.  The museum had a special exhibit on 200+ years of women in computing.  They focused on three.  Of course, the queen of computer software is Ada Lovelace, who envisioned what programmable computers could do long before there were programmable computers.

A few shots.

Ada died of uterine cancer just before turning 37.  She accomplished much in those years but her writings were practically her only footprint.  Except, the museum has a fragment of a letter she wrote with her full signature, very rare.  Call me goofy, but being this close to actual Ada is kinda neat.

The next lady featured is Grace Hopper (1906-1992), whose education included earning a Ph.D. in Mathematics from Yale.  

After Pearl Harbor, she joined the Navy and worked on early computers.  She has two claims to fame.  In 1945, while working on a computer, she found a moth stuck in one of the relays.  She removed it, taped it in her notebook with the notation "First actual case of a bug being found."  And that was the start of the computer terms "bug" & "debugging".

In 1949, she joined Eckert & Mauchly working on the UNIVAC I & II.  In 1952 she was credited with developing the concept of a compiler which translates mathematical code into machine readable code.  She wrote the first compiler called A-O.  She came up with the idea of programming using words instead of mathematical symbols & was told it would never work.  Longer story short, she was among the group that developed COBOL & wrote a compiler for it.

There's lots more on Amazing Grace as her subordinates called her but you'll have to come to Bozeman to read about it.

The third lady honored is Katherine Johnson (born 1918, still alive), one of three black students chosen to integrate West Virginia's graduate schools.  She did mathematical work in the early space programs.  Come to Bozeman to learn more.

Now for some of the other stuff.

There's an entire room devoted to cryptography, most of it on the Enigma, the WWII German encoding/decoding machine that flummoxed the Allies until it was broken.  There's a video re-enacting the process of coding a message on the "send" side and how it was decoded when received.

Here's a reproduction of an Enigma.  And extra rotors, authentic.  Only by seeing this exhibit did I come to appreciate how complex & ingenious this machine is.

 

A little known (I didn't know) historical item.  Thomas Jefferson developed a wheel cypher although it is not known if he ever used it.

There are other bits & pieces I could include but you'll have to see the rest for yourself.

OK, a sliver of irrelevant & irreverent Bozeman foolishness before I post this.

In and Around Bozeman

We've settled into the Garaj Mahal.  I promised a pic, here it is.  The entrance is on the left, up a flight of stairs and into a very nice place...a roomy kitchen/dining area/living room, a separate bedroom & a nice bathroom with tub & shower.  However, our landlady is converting to a minimum 30 day rental requirement.  We're hoping to be grandfathered in & be able to rent for 2-3 weeks next summer.

Burger Bob's is our favorite burger place.  Their signage can only be classified as "self-deprecation".

Didn't bother with a burger food pic; they all look pretty much the same.

We took a 300 mile day trip off the beaten track.  One thing you notice about Montana even on the beaten track is that there are lots & lots of rivers and streams.  I grew up in Wisconsin, pretty darned level with at most, gently rolling hills.  Wisconsin streams and rivers just meander, in no hurry to get anywhere.  The Fox River crept right through the center of my hometown Oshkosh.

But in Montana, the water is always in a hurry, rushing to get somewhere.  Here's a vid.
(Don't forget to go to the website to view vids.)

I guess that's what melting snow in the mountains does to water.

One of the requirements of my doing a blog is that I have to think about every photo/vid I shoot and what role, if any, it plays in the blog.  And one of the extreme frustrations of composing a post is to view the shots/vids and come to the conclusion that I should've done more or done it differently.

I'd like to do a post on Bozeman's Computer & Robotics Museum, considered one of the finest museums of its kind in the world, stuck here in an unlikely corner of the Northern Rockies.  We went there, I have the shots but I'm not satisfied with what I have & may go back before I post something about it.

But I ramble.

Along this scenic road, we came upon a waterfall gushing out of the side of a hill; obviously snow melt.  It flows into the stream shown above.  I'm not happy with the vid but not about to go back & re-shoot.  Here it is.

Also, a micro-video of a butterfly landing at my feet.  I really messed up the last third but was able to edit it out.  Note the sound of the rushing stream just a few feet away.

Some really old history.  About 10,000 years ago a glacier covered much of the very northern U.S. including Montana & as far east as upper Wisconsin.  With climate change, the glacier melted slowly in Wisconsin & deposited rocks and small boulders that had to be cleared before the land could be farmed.

We learned at the natural history museum in Missoula, the melt was more cataclysmic in the northwest, Idaho Wyoming & Montana.  A huge lake was formed (hundreds of square miles) that broke free suddenly.  Instead of depositing the rocks & boulders where they were, they were carried along until the flow was slow enough to deposit them.

Here is a mountain meadow, at 7600 feet.

You can see these large boulders randomly strewn about.  In other parts of the state, some of the boulders are as big as a bus.  That says the velocity of the flow was very high (estimated at 90mph) and very deep, hundreds & hundreds of feet.

10,000 years ago...seems like a long time back but geologically speaking, it was the day before yesterday.

(To digress a bit.  We know glaciers move...they flow like rivers, albeit slowly.  OTOH, ice patches are stationery patches of frozen snow that don't move and can be examined archeologically for evidence of human & animal habitation.  In the mountains of Wyoming & Montana, archeologists have been successful pulling cores from the ice and in probing the patches finding arrows and other evidence of human activity hundreds & thousands of years old.)

Along this same scenic byway, a series of historical markers tell the story of Joe Maurice who came to this place from Belgium in 1883 at age 13.  He homesteaded and early on, a horse accident took the sight of one eye.  He married and his wife had two children.  In the severe winter of 1905, diphtheria took his wife and in the spring, typhoid fever took his two daughters.  (The nearest doctor was 60 miles away, available only on horseback.)

He buried them in a small make-shift cemetery.  The grave markers are wood, not engraved so the paint wore off decades ago.  Here is what remains.

Apparently wanting to stay near his family, Joe, with his remaining eye dimming stuck it out here, still in the middle of nowhere, until 1963 when friends finally convinced him to move to a nearby rest home where he died in 1967 at age 97.  Now there was on tough Montanan!

(Yes, that's Susanne in the shade near the car.)

A ski run in the summer.

Just past the end of this road is Dillon, where we stayed the last night before reaching Missoula.  Now we have time to explore the downtown with its vintage late 19th century storefronts. 

I love old towns & cities, like Kansas City when I visit my daughter & her family.

And here's a bit of European architecture.  The building seems scrunched as I cropped out as much as I could of the 21st century...a light pole, RR crossing, cyclone fence.

End of the post.

From Missoula to Bozeman

Our last Missoula apartment view...the distant mountains catching the first rays of the morning sun with the last few patches of winter snow on the highest peak.  At the bottom of the pic still in shadow, Brennan's Wave, an enhanced rapids that the kayakers & surf-boarders love.

OK, time to explain Brennan's Wave.  The Clark Fork River that begins many miles to the west (left in the photo) and continues many miles east, has fast moving water and forms many rapids.  Here in downtown Missoula, the river was cleared of debris and the rapids were enhanced to increase the challenge of riding it.  The surfers & kayakers succeed as long as they remain relaxed with high concentration.  As you watch them, you can see something beginning to waver & soon they are toast.

Here's the local newspaper with a piece telling the whole Brennan story (you may have to scroll down a bit): Brennan

And here's a YouTube vid of kayakers taking the challenge: Kayakers

On Saturday, we headed out to Bozeman and for about the first hour the Clark Fork was snaking along beside us and under us to switch sides.

In Bozetown, it was great to return to the Garaj Mahal, our landlady Marjorie's name for the apartment above her garage, the first place we stayed in Bozeman back in 2015.  It had been occupied when we tried to reserve it the next two years but we were successful this year.  (GM pic later)

It's good to be "home", an easy walk to Heeb's, the local supermarket and to downtown Bozeman.  With more than two weeks ahead of us here, we can chill for the first few days.

So my first two photos aren't much, scenery-wise.

I never tire of seeing the liberal use of neon signs preserved, a reminder of my childhood when that was the only method of having self-illuminating signage.  Yes, that's Susanne on the left in the red top.

And where but in Montana and a few other northern states will you see a truck full of logs lumbering (pun!!!) along the main drag?

Once a month one of the local synagogues holds a "Brews for Jews" during happy hour at one of the local craft breweries.  We happened to catch one, first time in four years.  Here we are, half the turnout.

Another only in Montana (OIM) shot, this time specifically dictated by one of Montana's weird liquor laws.  Both sides of a slip of paper that's given to every customer.

I wandered out onto the patio to a lovely sight.  It was late in the afternoon, around 6pm.

On our way out we spotted the Montana version of Arizona's jackalope.

These wonderful oddities of nature exist only in taxidermy.

The Montanans have a saying, found on lots of T-shirts: "That which doesn't kill you makes you stronger except bears, because bears will kill you."

This post has been sitting around for a couple of days, waiting for more pics/talk.  I've got those pics but rather than wait, let's close out Missoula now & pic up Bozeman in the next post.

The Missoula Marathon & other sights

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Our 7th floor apartment (in Montana, that's high rise livin', man!) has a wonderful view of the Clark Fork River, Brennan's Wave (more in the next post) and the mountains.  Below us is Caras Park, the center of all city summer events.  This is marathon weekend in Missoula, warming up with a 5K this morning.

The forecast for today is 90°, very hot for MT, delightful for us.  But mercifully, the morning began cloudy & cool.  Not so good for the pic.

The starting line was off to the left outside our view, but we heard the crack of the starter pistol.  And there they go!!!

Backing up to dinner last night, we tried a new place just a block from home, called Red Bird, check the website:  RED BIRD  The food was wonderful as was the waiter.  Adam has worked here 17 years, took such good care for us, suggesting menu items and making adjustments for Susanne's avoidance of raw onion in any form.  We talked about Cold Smoke scotch ale (brewed here in Missoula)  He told us about one of the original scotch ales, brewed in Scotland, Skull Splitter.  At the end of the meal, he presented us with a bottle of Splitter, 8.5% ABV, yikes!

Here's a vid of the view from our apartment.

My favorite building in downtown Missoula is the Hotel Florence although it no longer functions as one.  It's my favorite because it has a glass brick theme which immediately dates it to the 1940's & 1950's.  It was completed in 1941.

Here it is in 1945:

 And in 2018:

Note a clock still stands on the sidewalk although it's been moved around and replaced several times, most recently in 1997 when it foolishly jumped in front of a truck.

In your travels, have you noticed any buildings incorporating glass brick?  The trend didn't last very long, probably because broken bricks are difficult to replace.

We did a quick tour of the Montana Museum of Natural History, tiny compared with the New York City version.

The griz had only a passing interest in Susanne since dinner was at hand, I mean...paw.

Susanne's very Montana shirt says "My sky is BIGGER than your sky". 

We were impressed that the rib cage on this bat looked very close to the human version.

All the subjects graciously agreed to hold still while I took the pic.

A couple of notable signs...the first one a sign of the times...teaching film photography???  So...last century!

And the second, our G-rating temporarily suspended:

PBR = Pabst Blue Ribbon.

We're leaving for Bozeman early tomorrow morning so I'm going to post this.  I'll catch the rest of the Missoula post in a couple of days.

Made it to Missoula

The drive up took about 2½ days in our trusty rented Chrysler 300, same car as last year, nagged Enterprise to have one available this time.  They did it!

My opinion, the 300 is the best highway car going.  It has lots & lots of passenger & luggage space.  It cruises quietly & effortlessly at high speeds.  The secret is in the transmission, 8 speed.

Once we cross into Utah, the speed limit on the interstates is 80 mph.  I set the cruise control for 86-88 mph and in 8th gear, the 6-cylinder engine loafs along at 1800 rpm.  It is plenty powerful & got 27mpg overall on the trip.  The optional Hemi V-8 will pass everything on the road but a gas station, so nix that.

Don't know if I'd ever want to own a 300, but as a cross-country cruiser...it's top notch!!!

The trip up was very uneventful, knock wood.  Our first night was in Beaver, UT; stayed at the same motel as last year, Butch Cassidy Best Western.  Nice as usual.  Only one really good restaurant in town, dinner there (again).

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Our goal for the second night was Idaho Falls, but once we got underway, our GPS said we'd get there by 1:30pm, too early to leave the road.  So we pressed on to Dillon, MT.

Here's our first look at Big Sky country, still some residual snow on the mountains.

For dinner in Dillon, we found a dive bar/restaurant with a gas station vibe.  Lots of Montana craft beers on tap, all but the two on the far right:

We immediately spotted our favorite (Cold Smoke, of course), the orange vertical rectangle near the right end, so we shared a big glass.



Above the beer taps on the right is our first "only in Montana" photo, a license plate:

Only in Montana would you have a vanity plate with their two favorite pastimes...drinking & big game hunting.

We got to Missoula before noon on Thursday.  That time on the road took its toll, we were tired.  We unpacked & moved in, then slept for a couple of hours.  For dinner we returned to the only restaurant I know of in the USA that serves Indonesian food, among other Asian specialties.  We had rendang daging (beef in a wonderful red sauce of Indonesian spices, over rice) and Nasi Goreng, a fried rice dish with lots of other goodies.  I got the camera out but forgot to take pix, as we dug in.  Tired brain.

Friday, still a bit tired.  Took the 300 in to Enterprise, they washed off 1100 miles of insects and vacuumed the interior.  They take good care of us.  Gassed up at Costco, that should last us til Bozeman.

We wandered the downtown, had lunch at a real dive bar, the Oxford Saloon, full of characters, the staff & customers...young-uns with ink & piercings, an old guy with a mohawk.

Have a virtual visit:  OXFORD

The real bona fides of a Montana dive bar is a big old bison head on the wall.  The Oxford doesn't disappoint.

There's an early tango practica tonight but we couldn't get our act together.  Will go to a milonga tomorrow  night.

OK, I'm going to quit here just to get something out.  Back in a couple of days.

A Quickie, More on 4th of July in Ennis

Apparently, Ennis is a popular spot in Montana to celebrate the 4th of July.

Here is link to the Bozeman Chronicle on this week's celebration.: ENNIS