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.
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