visiting the computer history museum (yes, i'm a geek)
What a great (and exhausting!) week at the Hortonworks Palo Alto office. I learned a lot; and more importantly I met some great people. I'm so excited to be on this journey and to be at Hortonworks!! A handful of us that had a bit of time before out flights where scheduled to leave (that's me; I'm on the red-eye tonight and I'm blogging this from the SFO airport) decided to head over to the Computer History Museum. It is across the street from the Googleplex and amazingly enough we ended up two cars behind one of Google's cool self-driving cars.
Kind of frustrating that a computer drives a better car than me, but hey... this blog post is about the computers anyway. Speaking of computers, the museum has an AWESOME Babbage Machine.
They cranked it a bit until the operator decided it had a slightly different feel to it that he didn't like. Hey, he's a volunteer – he won't even lose any money if they fire him. Seriously, it was pretty cool in action as you can see on their web page.
The museum had some very, very early computing devices. You know, the stuff that filled a room and had something like 16K of memory. These things could even process thousands of instructions per section. 
A lot of those early computing days centered on the military. They even had a German Enigma Machine.
I got it! It we would have just switched the letter Z with the letter Y in all those transmissions we would have broken their code!! 
The first real device I saw that hit home was a trusty old IBM S/360. I started my career on the mainframe and the "big iron" still holds a special place in my heart; I'm just glad I missed the card machines days!
The S/360 project leader also brought us an important book way back then whose message is just as relevant today. How did it go? Something about nine women not being able to have a baby in one month?
Speaking of Big Blue, a bit later on the tour was a machine that I was lucky enough to work on during my co-op days at IBM; the mighty RISC 6000. AIX was my first real experience with Unix and I fell in love with it. The (then) giant 24" CRT monitors were pretty cool, too.
The very end of the tour focused on more recent advancements such as cell phones, the commercialized Internet, and even iPods, but I truly enjoyed the computers of my youth. Sure, there were some Apples (II's, Lisas, and of course Macs), but would could ever forget the Trash 80's, my beloved TRS-80 line.
The wildly popular $99 Sinclair...
And, of course, Commodore's VIC-20 and C64.
There was also a fun set of exhibits focused on early video gaming. They had my personal favorite system; the Atari 2600. Notice this one is a 4-switcher with "real" simulated wood-grain.
This makes me want to dig out my old 2600 console and plug in classics like Yars Revenge and Pitfall and play like I was 14 again. Of course, my son is 14 now and he was NOT impressed the last time I pulled out this game system to show him. The video games today are truly awesome, but nothing can replace my memories of growing up on this machine in the 1980's.
So, if you find yourself in the Silicon Valley just south of San Francisco and have a couple of hours to burn, I do recommend the Computer History Museum. Well... that is if you're a true geek!