Last Post From Bozeman

We are leaving in a few days, so this is going to be a collection of miscellaneous photos.

Lot of videos.  If you received this by email, be sure to click on the title above to read on the web.

Let's call the first group "Signs of Bozeman".

Convoluted arithmetic...

Street sign in Gardiner, Montana, the north entrance to Yellowstone.

The next two are window signs at a local investment firm.  After digesting the caveats, who would want to walk through the door?

OTOH, anyone entering is fair game, n'est pas??

A little bit of corn.

Susanne & I hit the road yesterday to explore a small section of the Yellowstone River, one of the premier fishing rivers in Montana.  It begins in Y'stone, of course, heads north for about 50 miles, then turns right at Livingston heading east, then northeast through eastern Montana until crosses into North Dakota and empties into the Missouri just a smidgen inside N.D. then continues its way to join the Mississippi at St. Louis.

We followed the river from Livingston to Gardiner and back using different roads.  The weather was not kind to us.  It was gloomy & hazy, all the color drained from the landscape.  So, oodles of pics I have but they are b-o-r-r-ring.  So here are just a few, along with some vids.

A day bad for photography is probably a good day for fishing.

Mountains in front of mountains in front of mountains.  That's Montana!

Here is a 180º pan on one side of the road, further down towards Gardiner.

And crossing the road facing the opposite direction, another 180º pan, starting with Susanne.

Here's a still from the beginning of the vid above.

Back in Bozeman, we returned to the Gallatin History Museum, the former jailhouse until 1982.  Here are a few shots.

This is the 48 star flag I grew up with, Hawaii & Alaska didn't become states until 1959, by then I was in college.  I remember going to movies as a kid, every time this flag appeared on screen (mostly in war movies & westerns), everyone clapped & cheered.  Not these days!

One of the things I loved about volunteering with the Scottsdale Police Department was that assemblies always began with everyone standing, hands over hearts, reciting the Pledge of Allegiance.  And I remember as a grade school kid when "under God" was added & how we fumbled that in the beginning.

Gawd, I'm old!!!

Every town has a famous citizen.  For Bozeman, it's none other than Gary Cooper, graduate of Gallatin County High School, class of 1922.  The now Historical Museum is the building on  the left.

Susanne & I love to practice yoga when we travel.  Our best travel yoga was in Barcelona, I blogged about that.  Early morning yoga in Missoula was scarce.  We did one late afternoon class there.

But in Bozeman, our "home" studio (the one where we've taken classes during each of the last four summers) now offers a 6:30am class five weekday mornings.  We took a bunch of those.  Here's a sign in the changing area.

It turns out not a lot of yoga teachers & students get that.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Let's do some of Susanne's pics.

From the Y'stone road trip...green, green.

Alfred!!!!!

Snow melt gushing from the mountainside from the first road trip.

In & around Bozeman.

Sunrise.

At Famous Dave's BBQ:

Cat walking man walking dog.

Since this is my last post, I'm  going to make the most of it.

This is the Bozeman Sweet Pea Festival weekend.  It kicks off with a parade.  We didn't wait around for all of it, but the cops were at the start with two captains greeting the kids along the route.

We ran off to the festival and grabbed an iced tea to share.  Paper straws, by golly...that's Bozeman!

I'm kinda pictured out and blogged out.  So I didn't take many pics at the festival.  We walked past one of the stages as very young ballet girls were getting ready to perform, part of the Montana Ballet Company.

Here's a shot during the performance, some of them on stage for the first time.

I had to take a vid.  They're not very together or coordinated...ballet puppies, really.  But I hope some of them hang in there, keep at it and down the road, put Montana on the map in New York.

Tonight we're heading up the interstate for a bit to have some walleye for dinner.  No one serves it in Bozetown.  I grew up fishing for walleye with my dad & brother, bringing it home, my mother would fry it up for the family.  From lake to plate in a couple of hours.

Update: We arrived at the walleye place, but they sold out earlier in the evening.  Had steak instead.

OK, that's it for this jaunt.  Now to the serious business of finishing up the sights, closing up shop, then heading home.

See ya on the next trip wherever/whenever that'll be!


P.S. This is my 156th post since I started blogging seven years ago.  Some of you have been with me from the start.

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.