Over New Year’s, I got to visit the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA, and I’m finally going to post some photos from my visit.

First, what I really wanted to see was the computer with the first true GUI — the Xerox Alto:

Next up, the classic PDP-1, known to me as the machine on which the very first video game, Spacewar!, was programmed by some folks at MIT in 1962. Today, you can play Spacewar! online. When you do, notice that the spaceships are affected by “gravity” from the black hole in the center of the screen, but that the fired missiles are not. That’s due to the fact that the spaceship calculations were already maxing out the PDP-1’s processor cycles. And yes, that hulking monolith in the background is the CPU. The display and light pen are the interface. And those really are stacks of manila punchcards on the desk.

Two more landmark devices: On the left, an Interface Message Processor. This particular IMP was one of the first nodes on the ARPANET, which of course eventually grew into the Internet that we know today. On the right, one of Doug Engelbart’s first mice.

And now for a computer that nobody except the museum has heard of: the Kitchen Computer. From the museum’s description:

The Kitchen Computer was featured in the 1969 Neiman Marcus catalog as a $10,600 tool for housewives to store and retrieve recipes. Unfortunately, the user interface was only binary lights and switches. There is no evidence that any Kitchen Computer was ever sold.

I guess for some people, filing 3-by-5 cards in a box is easier than learning binary. Actually, just memorizing all your recipes would be easier than learning binary. “If it’s not usable, it doesn’t work.” An early, expensive lesson in the importance of usability.

And finally, some early ASCII art (“in color” even!) — the Mona Lisa represented in ASCII by H. Philip Peterson in 1964: