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: