Remember the Commodore 64?
It’s on display at the Computer Museum History Center.

By Edward B. Driscoll Jr., a writer based in San Jose, Calif.
September 1-3, 2001

he Computer Museum History Center is an active, ongoing museum currently housed in a Quonset-hut-style building on the grounds of NASA’s Moffett Federal Airfield in Mountain View, California. Behind it is the enormous Hanger One, one thousand feet long and 200 feet wide, built in the early 1930s for rigid Hindenburg-sized dirigibles. It overwhelms the museum’s facilities, and graphically illustrates a theme of miniaturization, which has benefited both aircraft and computers.

In a few years, the museum will be in a proper facility. In the interim, the museum’s current residence, dubbed "the visible storage facility," in the heart of the Silicon Valley, provides a unique and intimate view of the history of computers that may not be duplicated when the new facility opens.

The museum is currently divided into two rooms, one brimming with mainframes and supercomputers, the other filled with PCs, robots, and other staples of the computer world.

Chris Garcia, the museum’s historical collections coordinator and frequent tour leader, says, "we get a lot of the retired gentlemen who worked on all of these machines for 40 years, and could tell you every single fact about every machine.

"But there’s another group, people in their twenties, early thirties, who are just there for the beauty of this massive technology that they have grown up with. They’re seeing these things like Johnniac," (an early 1950s mainframe), "these massively gorgeous machines, and just falling in love them. I fell into that category when I first visited."

The Mother of All Air-Defense Computers
Speaking of massive, displayed prominently near the museum’s current main entrance is 400-square-feet worth of a late 1950s Air Force defense computer. This was the SAGE (Semi-Automatic Ground Environment) project, each facility of which contained a whopping 100,000 worth of vacuum tubes. The SAGE hardware in the museum’s collection came from one of a family of 28 identical computers, networked together and brought online in 1958 to create an embryonic Cold War air-defense system against Soviet nuclear bombers. The museum’s equipment is particularly noteworthy, since it was from the last operational SAGE to be removed from service, in North Bay, Ontario, in 1983.

In a way, SAGE may have been the Strategic Defense Initiative of its time. Just as the fear of SDI was enough to cause the Soviet Union to begin to unravel in the late 1980s, in the 1960s, larger-than-life rumors of SAGE’s existence made it enough of a threat to have helped keep the peace, especially during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Which is fortunate, because by the time SAGE was active in the early 1960s, it was essentially obsolete, as it was too slow to track hypersonic ICBMs.

Nonetheless, Chris Garcia says that the SAGE program featured "massive innovations in its architecture. Things like modems, CRTs, a decentralized network, and the light gun interface" (pictured above), which would allow the operator to click on a monitor and pull up information from various databases. The knowledge derived from SAGE would later be used in another aviation computer project, American Aviation’s Sabre airline reservations system.

Number Crunching, 19th-Century Style
Of course, Sage was far from the first computer employed by the U.S. government. That honor surely must rest with the oldest example of a computational device in the museum’s collection. It’s a reproduction of an 1890 Hollerith machine, (pictured below) beautifully recreated by a model maker for IBM in 1980.

The Hollerith machine’s claim to fame is its role in the 1890 Census. It cut the amount of time spent crunching the numbers in half, from the seven years it took in 1880, to the approximately three years spent in the early 1890s.

Using punched cards (insert obligatory chad jokes here), pins would fall through holes and there would be a circuit with a discrete pool of mercury. The circuit connected to a counter, which counted up each time there was what they called a "bip," which is just the completion of a circuit. It would advance, and then at the end of the day — by hand — everything was added everything up. It was not a computer by today’s standards, but it pointed the way towards them.

The PARC Before the Flood
No one would mistake the Hollerith for a PC-crunching data on Windows XP, but all technology has to start somewhere. For personal computers, that starting point was Xerox PARC, or Palo Alto Research Campus.

Anyone who’s seen the TV movie Pirates of Silicon Valley will be familiar with the story of how both Steve Jobs and Bill Gates benefited from the early Seventies pioneering work of Xerox PARC. The mouse, the graphical user interface, Ethernet networking, the laser printer, WSYWIG word processing--virtually everything we take for granted today on a PC came out of Xerox PARC.

Unfortunately, because the upper management at Xerox had pegged the retail price for each PARC computer at a whopping $20,000, they didn’t think that any individuals would want their own computers.

And then came the flood.

In 1974 Ed Roberts founded MITS and launched the Altair 8080, which sold for $395, complete with an operating system by some nascent firm called MicroSoft (yes, they spelled it that way, back in those hazy, Jurassic days). In 1976, Jobs and Steve Wozniak unveiled the Apple,

The next year, Radio Shack introduced the TRS-80, and Commodore unleashed the PET (see photo below). (Examples of all of those early computers sit in the PC section of the Computer History Museum.)

How do such diverse machines as the Sage and the original Xerox PARC computers wind up in the museum’s collection? Some are donated by their designers. Others come from corporate collections. However, many of the museum’s PCs come from donations from what Garcia calls "the angry-wife syndrome." Numerous husbands have cleaned out their garages or basements as a result of gentle pressure from their wives, and have come across parts, manuals, or even a whole computer. However, he does warn potential donors that there are certain items the museum has plenty of, such as TRS-80s, Commodore PETs, Sinclair ZX-80s and 81s, and Commodore 64s.

The Best Bargain in Computing
At the moment, the museum’s "visible storage facility" is not a museum, in the same way that say, The San Jose Tech Museum or Philadelphia’s Franklin Institute is — but it will be, soon.

NASA is planning to convert Moffett Field from an aging Navy air facility to a 220-acre combined research and historical park, with Hanger One being turned into a giant air-and-space museum devoted to California’s role in this field.

As part of that, Toole says that the museum expects to "break ground in 2003, and be operational in 2005, on a three acre tract of land, just in front of the big Hanger One. We’re going to build about a 114,000 square foot building on that parcel."

While it doesn’t have the flash of a modern, expensive facility, visiting the museum now, before it’s rebuilt has some advantages. "You can get an up close and personal tour of some of these things," Toole says, "like no place else in the world that I know of, bar none. I just wish we had more space and time and energy to put more of them of them out, but we expect to do that in 2005, when we really become operational."

The guided tours put on by Garcia and others at the museum are crucial, because unless an attendee has some familiarity with the history of computing, the significance of the collection will be lost. The new museum will replace personal guided tours with professionally arranged exhibits.

The cost? Until the new facilities open, it’s free — which may just be the best bargain, bar none, in the world of computers. Call ahead several days in advance of a tour (at 1-650-604-2579), to give the time to schedule it.

Museum Notes
For more information, visit the museum’s website, which highlights both the scope of the collection, and its history.