5 ms·

The most interesting part of the Living Computer Museum in Seattle, for those of whom have not visited, is not the Apple I or any of the 1970s/1980s PCs. What'

The most interesting part of the Living Computer Museum in Seattle, for those of whom have not visited, is not the Apple I or any of the 1970s/1980s PCs. What's more interesting is the big room in the back full of supercomputers, the CDC6500 - the amount of work to bring that back to life far, far outweighs the amount of work to bring the Apple 1 back to life. So they connected a new power converter to the Apple 1? Big whoop. The CDC6500 weighs more than 10,000 lbs, has liquid coolant, custom cabling that they had to set up new manufacturing lines for, everything is wired by hand, etc. In my opinion, supercomputing is a more relevant metaphor for the type of age we're living in, involving neural networks, brute force type machine learning on a big server that we all share, in a sense...the 60's are alive again man!

peatmoss 10y ago
Definitely! Also, what I was told is the worlds only functioning PDP-7 was a highlight... and the Parc Alto. It's not a particularly big museum, but man, what a great collection.
- vvanders 10y ago
  Yeah, was just coming here to mention the Alto. It's hard to describe the feeling of seeing one of those in-person and running. So much came from such a small machine. If you're in Seattle the Living Computer Museum is a must-visit.
  - markdoubleyou 10y ago
    I'm a member and have visited a few times with my 5 year old son--it's a good rainy day activity for kids. The downstairs area is beautiful space for kids to run around and tinker with robots, and it never seems to be crowded (not even on weekends). The museum is shockingly liberal with what they let kids touch, so when I take him upstairs to the historic collection I'm always terrified that he'll break something. Fortunately a lot of that gear from the 60's was built to last and is intimidating to little kids... for example, their punch card reader is bigger than a copy machine, and volunteers hand out earplugs before running it.
- pradn 10y ago
  They even have a functioning teletype machine! I typed in the basic Unix commands I knew (cd, ls, mkdir, etc) and they all worked just as I expected. I've been using terminals for a few years, so it was amazing to see the origins of that user interface.

peatmoss 10y ago

Definitely! Also, what I was told is the worlds only functioning PDP-7 was a highlight... and the Parc Alto. It's not a particularly big museum, but man, what a great collection.

vvanders 10y ago
Yeah, was just coming here to mention the Alto. It's hard to describe the feeling of seeing one of those in-person and running. So much came from such a small machine. If you're in Seattle the Living Computer Museum is a must-visit.
- markdoubleyou 10y ago
  I'm a member and have visited a few times with my 5 year old son--it's a good rainy day activity for kids. The downstairs area is beautiful space for kids to run around and tinker with robots, and it never seems to be crowded (not even on weekends). The museum is shockingly liberal with what they let kids touch, so when I take him upstairs to the historic collection I'm always terrified that he'll break something. Fortunately a lot of that gear from the 60's was built to last and is intimidating to little kids... for example, their punch card reader is bigger than a copy machine, and volunteers hand out earplugs before running it.
pradn 10y ago
They even have a functioning teletype machine! I typed in the basic Unix commands I knew (cd, ls, mkdir, etc) and they all worked just as I expected. I've been using terminals for a few years, so it was amazing to see the origins of that user interface.