EXPLORE THE COLLECTION

A sampling of objects from across the Museum’s five collections

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Slide-a-Mat Retailing System prototype | CHM#: X3598.2006

Date: 1965 | Collection: Objects | Source: Gift of Brian Kelly Carolan

This 1965 prototype is early evidence of a novel concept in retailing that looks very familiar from our 2007 perspective. Want to bring your merchandise to potential ready-to-buy customers? Allow customers to compare products and services among vendors? Save them time? Allow them to shop from an armchair? Eliminate traffic congestion? These are not web-based ideas. They are just some of the advantages the Slide-a-Mat Retailing System offered— thirty years before the World Wide Web.

The Slide-a-Mat consisted of a custom desk with two rear-projection screens (with slide projectors inside), one of which showed a product or service and the other of which showed additional information such as specifications. If customers wanted to buy, they pushed one of the buttons running along the edge of the desk to specify the product, color, size, and other features.

To enable customers to place orders, the Slide-a-Mat included a telephone with an optical sense card reader and a set of cards. When ready, the customer slid a vendor-specific plastic card into the telephone, which then dialed the vendor and connected the customer to a salesperson.

The Slide-a-Mat was patented, but internal problems led the company to go under. This prototype is the only physical trace of the system in existence. _Dag Spicer

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Man & Computer, 16-mm film | CHM#: X3604.2006

Date: 1965 | Collection: Media | Source: Gift of Howard Chang

Starting in the 1940s, IBM became a major producer of films used for training, documenting business processes, entertaining at company functions, and educating the public. Several IBM films were made by respected filmmakers and sometimes featured well-known actors such as Bob Newhart.

The film Man & Computer, made by IBM’s UK branch in 1965, provides a basic understanding of computer operations. A large portion of the film shows the ways in which a computer can be simulated by five people using the standard office equipment of the day. The film employs a number of different techniques, including animations, and features a few brief scenes of an IBM System/360 in use—just months after the first machines were delivered. _Chris Garcia

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IBM System/360 sales models | CHM#: X3749.2007

Date: 1965 | Collection: Ephemera | Source: Gift of Al Burstiner

On April 7, 1964, IBM made the most dramatic announcement in computer history. After investing nearly $5 billion in research and development, IBM had created a family of computer models that spanned a 40:1 performance range—and could all run the same software. This family of machines was known as the “System/360,” an allusion to the system covering all points of the customer compass, from a small business doing payroll to a university undertaking scientific research to government agencies processing millions of checks per month.

Even though it was already the market leader in punch card equipment and “electronic data processing machines,” this was a remarkable gamble by IBM.

After supporting seven mutually incompatible computer lines for years, IBM developed the System/360 as a means of simplifying their computer offerings for salespeople and customers alike. The System/360 was supremely successful. Its architecture dominated the mainframe computer industry for more than three decades and can still be seen in various IBM mainframes. IBM sold more than $100 billion worth of System/360 installations over the life of the family—a remarkable milestone, even by today’s standards.

These sales models were used in two ways: first, as part of the presentation made by an IBM salesperson to potential customers; second, as a tool for planning computer installation and layout of the room where the computer would eventually reside. _Dag Spicer

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MacHack VI vs. Hubert Dreyfus, paper tape | CHM#: X3278.2006

Date: 1967 | Collection: Software | Source: Gift of Bruce Buchanan

Hubert Dreyfus, a professor of philosophy at MIT in the 1960s, found that many of his students thought artificial intelligence (AI) was an already accomplished fact. This misplaced faith helped shape Dreyfus into an early critic of AI’s claims, and in 1965 he was hired by the think tank the RAND Corporation to explore the issue. The result was a ninety-page paper questioning the computer’s ability to serve as a model for the human brain and asserting, for example, that no computer program could defeat even a ten-year-old child at chess.

Two years later Richard Greenblatt, formerly an undergraduate at MIT, wrote a chess program using only 16K of memory for the DEC PDP-6 computer. The program, MacHack VI, played chess at a level far above its predecessors, a factor that would surprise Dreyfus (and the AI community) when demonstrated.

With some confidence, students at MIT challenged Dreyfus to play a game against MacHack VI. Dreyfus lost and the game became a milestone moment in AI—at least for AI proponents.

In fairness to Dreyfus, 1960s computers were primitive ancestors of today’s machines, so to claim computers could think does indeed seem grandiose, even from today’s perspective. After fifty years of research, one of the key conclusions of AI is that, for machines, simple things (e.g., tying a shoe) are difficult and difficult things (e.g., playing chess) are simple. _Kirsten Tashev

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Typed resignation letter from J. Presper Eckert, Jr., to Dr. Pender | CHM#: X3278.2006

Date: March 25, 1946 | Collection: Documents | Source: Purchase of CHM

The transition of an invention from the laboratory to the marketplace, often difficult, is a process nearly every technology-based company must go through at some stage. In 1946, Presper (“Pres”) Eckert and John Mauchly, inventors of the ENIAC computer at the University of Pennsylvania’s Moore School of Engineering, wanted to form their own company but were constrained by their agreement with the university over patent rights to the EDVAC, ENIAC’s successor.

In his resignation letter, Eckert writes: I have felt that the patent rights which have been assured me in connection with my work up to this time were an important part of my remuneration…it seems sensible at this time to resign, since…our commercial ideas for computing machines are incompatible with the Moore School’s development program.

Eckert and Mauchly founded the Electronic Control Company (ECC), which became the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation (EMCC) in 1947. With the death of their main financial backer only two years later, Eckert and Mauchly sold their business to the Remington Rand Corporation. For this they received $200,000 and a guarantee of eight years of employment. Their first commercial computer, the UNIVAC I, was delivered to the United States Census Bureau on March 31, 1951.

Although their own business failed, leaving an opening for Remington Rand, Eckert and Mauchly remained pioneers in the development of large-scale electronic computing systems. _Paula Jabloner