Computer History Museum
   HOME
*



picture info

Computer History Museum
The Computer History Museum (CHM) is a museum of computer history, located in Mountain View, California. The museum presents stories and artifacts of Silicon Valley and the information age, and explores the computing revolution and its impact on society. History The museum's origins date to 1968 when Gordon Bell began a quest for a historical collection and, at that same time, others were looking to preserve the Whirlwind computer. The resulting ''Museum Project'' had its first exhibit in 1975, located in a converted coat closet in a DEC lobby. In 1978, the museum, now ''The Digital Computer Museum'' (TDCM), moved to a larger DEC lobby in Marlborough, Massachusetts. Maurice Wilkes presented the first lecture at TDCM in 1979 – the presentation of such lectures has continued to the present time. TDCM incorporated as '' The Computer Museum'' (TCM) in 1982. In 1984, TCM moved to Boston, locating on Museum Wharf. In 1996/1997, the TCM History Center (TCMHC) was established; a ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  




Gordon Bell
Chester Gordon Bell (born August 19, 1934) is an American electrical engineer and manager. An early employee of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) 1960–1966, Bell designed several of their PDP machines and later became Vice President of Engineering 1972–1983, overseeing the development of the VAX. Bell's later career includes entrepreneur, investor, founding Assistant Director of NSF's Computing and Information Science and Engineering Directorate 1986–1987, and researcher emeritus at Microsoft Research, 1995–2015. Early life and education Gordon Bell was born in Kirksville, Missouri. He grew up helping with the family business, Bell Electric, repairing appliances and wiring homes. Bell received a B.S. (1956), and M.S. (1957) in electrical engineering from MIT. He then went to the New South Wales University of Technology (now UNSW) in Australia on a Fulbright Scholarship, where he taught classes on computer design, programmed one of the first computers to arrive in Aus ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

The Computer Museum, Boston
The Computer Museum was a Boston, Massachusetts, museum that opened in 1979 and operated in three locations until 1999. It was once referred to as TCM and is sometimes called the Boston Computer Museum. When the museum closed and its space became part of Boston Children's Museum next door in 2000, much of its collection was sent to the Computer History Museum in California. History The Digital Computer History Museum The Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) Museum Project began in 1975 with a display of circuit and memory hardware in a converted lobby closet of DEC's Main (Mill) Building 12 in Maynard, Massachusetts. In September 1979, with the assistance of Digital Equipment Corporation, Gordon and Gwen Bell founded the Digital Computer Museum in a former RCA building in Marlboro, Massachusetts. Though entirely funded by DEC and housed within a corporate facility, from its inception the museum's activities were ecumenical, with an industry-wide, international preservation mission. ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Mountain View, California
Mountain View is a city in Santa Clara County, California, United States. Named for its views of the Santa Cruz Mountains, it has a population of 82,376. Mountain View was integral to the early history and growth of Silicon Valley, and is the location of many high technology companies. In 1956, William Shockley established Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in Mountain View, the first company to develop silicon semiconductor devices in Silicon Valley. Today, Mountain View houses the headquarters of many of the world's largest technology companies, including Google and Alphabet Inc., Unicode Consortium, Intuit, NASA Ames research center, and major headquarter offices for Microsoft, NortonLifeLock, Symantec, 23andMe, LinkedIn, Samsung, and Synopsys. History The Mexican land grant of Rancho Pastoria de las Borregas was given in 1842 by Alta California Governor Juan Bautista Alvarado, Juan Alvarado to Francisco Estrada. This grant was later passed on to Mariano Castro, who sold ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Silicon Graphics
Silicon Graphics, Inc. (stylized as SiliconGraphics before 1999, later rebranded SGI, historically known as Silicon Graphics Computer Systems or SGCS) was an American high-performance computing manufacturer, producing computer hardware and software. Founded in Mountain View, California in November 1981 by Jim Clark, its initial market was 3D graphics computer workstations, but its products, strategies and market positions developed significantly over time. Early systems were based on the Geometry Engine that Clark and Marc Hannah had developed at Stanford University, and were derived from Clark's broader background in computer graphics. The Geometry Engine was the first very-large-scale integration (VLSI) implementation of a geometry pipeline, specialized hardware that accelerated the "inner-loop" geometric computations needed to display three-dimensional images. For much of its history, the company focused on 3D imaging and was a major supplier of both hardware and software ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Google
Google LLC () is an American multinational technology company focusing on search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics. It has been referred to as "the most powerful company in the world" and one of the world's most valuable brands due to its market dominance, data collection, and technological advantages in the area of artificial intelligence. Its parent company Alphabet is considered one of the Big Five American information technology companies, alongside Amazon, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft. Google was founded on September 4, 1998, by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were PhD students at Stanford University in California. Together they own about 14% of its publicly listed shares and control 56% of its stockholder voting power through super-voting stock. The company went public via an initial public offering (IPO) in 2004. In 2015, Google was reor ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Apple I
The Apple Computer 1, originally released as the Apple Computer and known later as the Apple I or Apple-1, is an 8-bit desktop computer released by the Apple Computer Company (now Apple Inc.) in 1976. It was designed by Steve Wozniak. The idea of selling the computer came from Wozniak's friend and Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. The Apple I was Apple's first product, and to finance its creation, Wozniak sold his HP-65 calculator for $500 and Jobs sold a second hand VW Microbus, for a few hundred dollars (Wozniak later said that Jobs planned instead to use his bicycle to get around). Wozniak demonstrated the first prototype in July 1976 at the Homebrew Computer Club in Palo Alto, California. Production was discontinued on September 30, 1977, after the June 10, 1977 introduction of its successor, the Apple II, which ''Byte'' magazine referred to as part of the "1977 Trinity" of personal computing (along with the PET 2001 from Commodore Business Machines and the TRS-80 Model I from ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Kitchen Computer
The Honeywell 316 was a popular 16-bit minicomputer built by Honeywell starting in 1969. It is part of the Series 16, which includes the Models 116 (1965, discrete), 316 (1969), 416 (1966), 516 (1966) and DDP-716 (1969). They were commonly used for data acquisition and control, remote message concentration, clinical laboratory systems, Remote Job Entry and time-sharing. The Series-16 computers are all based on the DDP-116 designed by Gardner Hendrie at Computer Control Company, Inc. (3C) in 1964. The 516 and later the 316 were used as Interface Message Processors (IMP) for the American ARPANET and the British NPL Network. History Computer Control Company developed a computer series named Digital Data Processor, of which it built two models: * DDP-116 - the first of the Series 16 * DDP-124 - part of a trio of 24-bit systems: DDP-24, 124, 224. Honeywell bought the company after the 24 trio, and built the balance of the Series 16. The H-316 was used by Charles H. Moore to deve ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Neiman Marcus
Neiman Marcus Group, Inc. is an American integrated luxury retailer headquartered in Dallas, Texas, which owns Neiman Marcus, Bergdorf Goodman, Horchow, and Last Call. Since September 2021, NMG has been owned by a group of investment companies led by Davidson Kempner Capital Management, Sixth Street Partners and Pacific Investment Management. History 1907–1949 Herbert Marcus Sr., a former buyer with Dallas' Sanger Brothers department store, had left his previous job to found a new business with his sister Carrie Marcus Neiman and her husband, Abraham Lincoln Neiman, then employees of Sanger Brothers competitor A. Harris and Co. In 1907, the trio had $25,000 from the successful sales-promotion firm they had built in Atlanta, Georgia, and two potential investments of funds. Rather than take a chance on an unknown "sugary soda pop business," the three entrepreneurs rejected the fledgling Coca-Cola company and chose instead to return to Dallas to establish a retail busin ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Utah Teapot
The Utah teapot, or the Newell teapot, is a 3D test model that has become a standard reference object and an in-joke within the computer graphics community. It is a mathematical model of an ordinary Melitta-brand teapot that appears solid with a nearly rotationally symmetrical body. Using a teapot model is considered the 3D equivalent of a "Hello, World!" program, a way to create an easy 3D scene with a somewhat complex model acting as the basic geometry for a scene with a light setup. Some programming libraries, such as the OpenGL Utility Toolkit, even have functions dedicated to drawing teapots. The teapot model was created in 1975 by early computer graphics researcher Martin Newell, a member of the pioneering graphics program at the University of Utah. It was one of the first to be modeled using bézier curves rather than precisely measured. History For his work, Newell needed a simple mathematical model of a familiar object. His wife, Sandra Newell, suggested mo ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Cray-3
The Cray-3 was a vector supercomputer, Seymour Cray's designated successor to the Cray-2. The system was one of the first major applications of gallium arsenide (GaAs) semiconductors in computing, using hundreds of custom built ICs packed into a CPU. The design goal was performance around 16 GFLOPS, about 12 times that of the Cray-2. Work started on the Cray-3 in 1988 at Cray Research's (CRI) development labs in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin. Other teams at the lab were working on designs with similar performance. To focus the teams, the Cray-3 effort was moved to a new lab in Colorado Springs, Colorado later that year. Shortly thereafter, the corporate headquarters in Minneapolis decided to end work on the Cray-3 in favor of another design, the Cray C90. In 1989 the Cray-3 effort was spun off to a newly formed company, Cray Computer Corporation (CCC). The launch customer, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, cancelled their order in 1991 and a number of company executives lef ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Cray-2
The Cray-2 is a supercomputer with four vector processors made by Cray Research starting in 1985. At 1.9 GFLOPS peak performance, it was the fastest machine in the world when it was released, replacing the Cray X-MP in that spot. It was, in turn, replaced in that spot by the Cray Y-MP in 1988. The Cray-2 was the first of Seymour Cray's designs to successfully use multiple CPUs. This had been attempted in the CDC 8600 in the early 1970s, but the emitter-coupled logic (ECL) transistors of the era were too difficult to package into a working machine. The Cray-2 addressed this through the use of ECL integrated circuits, packing them in a novel 3D wiring that greatly increased circuit density. The dense packaging and resulting heat loads were a major problem for the Cray-2. This was solved in a unique fashion by forcing the electrically inert Fluorinert liquid through the circuitry under pressure and then cooling it outside the processor box. The unique "waterfall" cooler syste ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Cray-1
The Cray-1 was a supercomputer designed, manufactured and marketed by Cray Research. Announced in 1975, the first Cray-1 system was installed at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1976. Eventually, over 100 Cray-1s were sold, making it one of the most successful supercomputers in history. It is perhaps best known for its unique shape, a relatively small C-shaped cabinet with a ring of benches around the outside covering the power supplies and the cooling system. The Cray-1 was the first supercomputer to successfully implement the vector processor design. These systems improve the performance of math operations by arranging memory and registers to quickly perform a single operation on a large set of data. Previous systems like the CDC STAR-100 and ASC had implemented these concepts but did so in a way that seriously limited their performance. The Cray-1 addressed these problems and produced a machine that ran several times faster than any similar design. The Cray-1's architect w ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]