Computer History Museum

<p>Object has a "THE COMPUTER CENTER" sticker on the back of the computer.</p>

<p>Steve Jobs introduces the Macintosh, followed by a panel includnig Steve Capps, Andy Hertzfeld, Randy Wigginton, Bill Atkinson, Bruce Horn, Burrell Smith, Owen Densmore, and Rony Sebok.</p>

<p>Object consists of main unit, two attached contollers, tv antenna switch and orignal box. Dimensions are of box only.</p>

<p>Black and white image of Dan Edwards (left) and Peter Samson (right) playing Spacewar! on the PDP-1 Type 30 display. This was collected along with other photos under DEC photo library identification number 10159, which consists of a group of historical photographs.</p>

18 songs played by an IBM 7090 computer with a digital-to-sound transducer, using punch cards. This recording contains the first songs composed and played on a computer. The songs, composed by Max Matthews and John Pierce, were recorded by Bruce Strasser at Bell Laboratories.

Two-sided long-playing phonograph record containing recordings of music by Johann Sebastian Bach played on an IBM 704.

This volume contains a mix of brief notes on the status of experimental wafers together with extended disclosures of process and design ideas that were used as the basis for patent filings. Specific entries include: "Method of protecting exposed p-n junctions at the surface of silicon transistors by oxide masking techniques" (pp. 3-4) this was his first expression of the planar process – U.S. patent 3025589; "Effect of gold-doping on lifetimes in transistors" (pp. 7-11) – U.S. patent 3108914; “Use of selective control on electron and hole lifetimes in semiconductor devices” (pp. 12-15) – U.S. patent 3184347; “PNP planar transistors” (pp. 17-18); “On the application of the Merck growing technique to device structures;” “Observations on the impact and applications of epitaxial films” (pp. 23-24); “Logic using unipolar transistors” proposes a practical method of implementing the ideas of Walmark at RCA (pp. 26–28).

Purchased for Make Software Change the World exhibit.

<p>The Altair 8800 kit was introduced as the cover story on the January 1975 edition of Popular Electronics. Though 'home-brew' experimental systems existed well before the Altair, none had the Altair's wide- reaching popularity. Word length: 8 bits. CPU Circuitry: Intel 8080. Prymary Memory: 256 Bytes. Price: $ 397. The Altair inspired Bill Gates, then at Harvard University, to write a BASIC interpreter so that users could easily program the machine. This was the start of Microsoft. MITS was sold to Pertec and the Altair line did not last long. Paper tape was signed by Bill Gates during his appearance at the museum on Oct. 1, 2004 (acid free pen used for signature). The insrciption reads "Bill Gates Paul Allen MITS Altair 2 Mar 75."</p>

<p>Package had various price sticker labels in yen: "3980" and "4179". Sticker was removed and plastic packaging was discarded.</p>

John T. Potter, who founded Potter Instrument Company in 1942, was a prolific inventor with over 80 US patents. On September 1, 1948 he applied for a patent on a "Three-Dimensional Selector and Memory Device", and it was issued as patent number 2,620,389 on December 2, 1952. The invention was for a digital storage device that used steel wires strung on a set of two-dimensional frames that were packed together in rows. The machine would access one of the frames, then a particular wire in the frame, and then the data recorded somewhere on the wire. It was three-dimensional memory. In 1955 Potter negotiated a contract with the of the Univac military computer division of Sperry Rand to develop and build three of the three-dimensional memories. The Project Engineer was George Comstock, who began work on January 2, 1956. Just sixteen months later, in April 1957, the three working completed units were delivered to Univac in St. Paul, Minnesota. But there were several significant differences from the invention as disclosed in the patent: 1. Instead of wires, the storage medium was strips of the 1⁄2" mylar-backed magnetic tape that was commonly being used in reel-to-reel computer tape drives. 2. Instead of using rotating shafts and electromagnets, the three-dimensional positioning was done using hydraulic cylinders with binary-coded displacements. This was a variation of a positioning system using binary- coded rotating rings that Potter had filed a patent on in 1951. 3. The storage bin containing all the tapes could be taken out of the unit and replaced with another, making the total amount of storage unlimited. This interchangeable media provided true removable data storage. None of the other random-access magnetic storage devices of the time, like IBM's RAMAC disk drive, had removable media.

<p>Autographed "Woz" by Steve Wozniak in black marker on wood top.</p>

<p>The object consists of a number of components housed in a wooden case. The case is divided vertically into two compartments. The CPU was likey operated using a numeric keypad and keyboard. The compartment in the front on the left has a status display and 8 rows of modules, most of which are missing. Two rectangular holes have been cut into the right side of the wooden case. On the front right are 3 rows of modules and a number of controls, meters, and fuses. Sample labels include MAGNETIC TAPES, CLOCK, PUNCH, KITCHEN CONSOLE, TRUNK, FUSE, and BLOWERS. On the back left are the back side of the module racks and various hand-wired bundles. On the back right are the attached power cord and a blower.</p>

<p>Computer is attached to a wooden base.</p>

Color image of one man in a suit standing at the front of a lecture hall looking out with rows of seated people looking at him. This image is of part of the center and most of the stage right side of the room.

<p>This is a small model of a Jacquard loom with paper punch cards. A long metal handle protrudes from the top right. A Bell inventory sticker is affixed to the underside of the wooden base.</p> <p>The Jacquard Loom was invented by Joseph Jacquard and first demonstrated in 1801. It is an attachment for powered fabric looms and is considered one of the first programmable devices. It operates via a chain of punch cards that instruct the loom on making intricate textiles.</p> <p>The Jacquard Loom is important to computer history because it is the first machine to use interchangeable punch cards to instruct a machine to perform automated tasks.</p>

<p>SRI International&rsquo;s first prototype computer mouse, by Douglas Engelbart. Constructed by Bill English, the mouse rolled on two sharp wheels facing 90 degrees from each other.</p>

<p>This is a black and white photograph of Lee Felsenstein standing at a lectern speaking. An unidentified man is seated behind Felsenstein. They are both wearing suit coats and neither have beards.</p>

<p>The object is a base computer for the Imagination Machine. It contains a QWERTY keyboard, a place to set a game console, a connection for attaching the game console, a connection for a program cartridges,a casssette tape recorder, a loudspeaker with a volume control, a microphone jack, a power indicator light, an ON/OFF switch, and a 5-pin DIN power input connector.</p>

Lotus introduces its 1-2-3 spreadsheet software at the February 1983 BCS meeting.

<p>Original white porcelain teapot on which the widely distributed teapot data set is based. The teapot has frequently been used to test techniques of rendering three-dimensional objects using computer graphics. Teapots rendered as a wire frame outline- Warnock- Gouraud and Phong shaded have been published as well as many versions with simulated reflections of an environment- and shape distortions. The frequency of use of the teapot as a test object in computer graphics has given it the status of a benchmark. Data for the teapot created and input by Martin Newell- 1974- University of Utah- Salt Lake City.</p>

<p>This object is the PSP-2 -- the Portable Speech Processor 2 -- created in late 1978 at Stanford University through the leadership of Professor Robert White. This device was part of a very early experimental portable cochlear implant developed there, which was influential in the overall development of the technology. Approximately one million cochlear implants have been used by the hard of hearing and deaf people. The cochlear implants provide functional hearing, enabling users to hold conversations, develop spoken language skills, and much more. The team at Stanford working on this early, perhaps first, portable, multi-channel cochlear implant at the end of the 1970s was the same team that, in the 1960s, had been the first to implant a multi-channel cochlear implant in a patient, and introduced the term &ldquo;cochlear implant.&rdquo; Originally worn in a backpack by its users, this PSP-2 unit was responsible for taking incoming audio and processing it into signals then sent through the implanted electrodes into the user&rsquo;s auditory nerve. This PSP-2 unit uses several CMOS microprocessors from Intersil (IM6100) and 1K RAM chips to form a parallel, multi-processor system. Programming for the speech processor took place on a DEC PDP-11. A note taped to the top cover of the object says, "World's first portable cochlear implant signal processor + power supply."</p>

<p>This is a black and white image of Grace Hopper in front of UNIVAC magnetic tape drives. She holds a COBOL programming manual in her hand.</p>

<p>This console was the user interface to the SAGE (Semi- Automatic Ground Environment) computer system known as the "FSQ-7." Begun in 1952 (and operational six years later), SAGE became the first U.S. continental air defense system, linking dozens of radar stations, weather bureaus, airports, and air force command centers together into a real-time early warning system. It comprised redundant CPUs, modems, "light gun" input, and earned its IBM, its prime contractor, over $1 billion in revenues over the life of the system. Despite it's complement of more than 50,000 vacuum tubes, the FSQ-7 was highly reliable (&gt; 99.97% uptime). Gray with yellow scope</p>

Composition by Emmanuel Ghent

<p>This device is the earliest head-mounted stereoscopic display and the earliest precursor to virtual reality goggles. Watch this CHM lecture by Sutherland and Sproul for the full story: https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102639877</p>

<p>Object is a printed circuit board (PCB) panel with rows of magnetic cores installed. On the core side, "CORNELL B-B" is etched on the PCB. There is a piece of tape on the back with "8 &amp; 9" written on it, and "LAND" written on the board in marker. This analog-biased core memory plane was used in the Adaptive system ("A-unit," in modern terminology the "hidden layer" of a simple three layer feed forward neural network). Each core stored the weight of a connection between neural units. Being analog, the output response from each core had a roughly sigmoid or S-shaped curve to it, rather than a flat square jump as a digital core might have, and about a hundred different states could be read out of each core. This was a component of the Tobermory Perceptron, the second of two perceptrons implemented in hardware by Frank Rosenblatt and his collaborators at the Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory in Buffalo, NY and Cornell University in Ithaca, NY, the other being its more famous precursor the Mark I Perceptron. Unlike the Mark I, which was built to model visual perception and pattern recognition, the Tobermory was built to model auditory pattern recognition.</p>

<p>Object is a small metal box. On the front face is a small grille and a spring clip to hold it in a pocket. On the top left corner is a three-position slide switch. On the top right is a plastic wheel (volume control?). The lower rear case swings up to reveal a battery compartment. The Sonotone 1010 is described in: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonotone_1010 It is also mentioned and depicted in: https://hearingaidmuseum.com/gallery/General_Info/GenInfoTransBody/info/generalinfo-transistor-body.htm Material provided by the donor includes this text: "First commercial product using a transistor... Two Sonotone subminiature vacuum tubes, NPN grown junction transistor. Sonotone was unique among midcentury hearing aid manufacturers because this company manufactured the tubes and the actual hearing aids. All other major ... companies of the time... purchased the tubes from... suppliers such as Raytheon... Sonotone did not enter the transistor business ... using purchased transistors..."</p>

<p>Paper attached reads: "Macintosh, not a plus(800k disk drive), 128 Enhanced (upgraded to 512), w/ External Drive (400k) internal mac drive ~400k drive."</p>

This interpretive production of the Computer History Museum's Software History Center was created from archival footage of Dan Ingalls demonstrating the Smalltalk integrated environment and object-oriented programming language on the Museum’s restored Xerox Alto computer at the Museum’s Shustek Research Archives on February 13, 2018 and June 20, 2018. The brainchild of Alan Kay’s Learning Research Group at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), Smalltalk was designed to transform computers into personal dynamic media, giving users (especially children) the capability to easily build simulations and to modify the system as they saw fit. Smalltalk also pioneered aspects of modern graphical user interfaces (GUIs) and integrated development environments (IDEs): overlapping windows, popup menus, paned hierarchical class browsers, integrated debuggers, as well as the BitBLT graphics primitive routine. In this video, Ingalls repeats a demonstration that he gave to Steve Jobs, who visited PARC in 1979: making live code changes to fundamental system behavior, such as text selection highlighting and scrolling. Ingalls also shows off Smalltalk’s graphics capabilities, including turtle graphics and bitmap editing.