CS 160 Visit to the Computer History Museum

On Saturday, May 10, 2008, students from both sections of CS 160 Software Engineering visited the Computer History Museum in Mt. View. We all had a great time! The Computer History Museum is free and open to the public.

Activities that morning included:

Seeing a life-size hand-cranked working model of the Babbage Difference Engine. It was originally designed by Charles Babbage in the early 1800s to compute polynomials. Babbage was arguably the world's first computer scientist. He even designed a printer to output the results as they were computed!
Experiencing a restored IBM 1401 computer system in a raised-floor computer room. This is a small business mainframe computer, extremely popular in the early 1960s, that used punched cards.
Getting a tour of the museum's main exhibit hall that includes computers and artifacts from throughout the history of computing. We saw part of the original ENIAC, which the CS department server is named after.

Click on each photo to download the full-size version.

	The life-size hand-cranked working model of the Babbage Difference Engine. The printer is at the lower left. In modern terms, this engine supported microprogramming and parallel processing! Unfortunately, he was never able to build this machine, but his designs were correct. Charles Babbage's photo is in the background.
	Programming the Difference Engine. It's not Java, but it's definitely object-oriented!
	Cranking each machine cycle.
	Learning about punched-card equipment from volunteer docent Bill Worthington.
	Volunteer docent David Cortesi by the main unit of the restored IBM 1401 computer system in the air-conditioned raised-floor computer room. He is holding SMS component cards in his right hand. The machine was first released in 1959 and had a transistor-based 0.087 MHz CPU. The main unit included 4,000 memory locations and the 1406 unit (seen to the left of the oscilloscope) contained an additional 12,000 locations, for a grand total of 16,000 locations. The 1403 printer is at the right.
	This is the 1402 card reader punch. Its top reading speed is 800 cards per minute! Computing back in those days was not just good electrical engineering, but also superb mechanical engineering that would be hard to match even today.
	This 1403 line printer can print 600 lines per minute with each line up to 132 characters long. The printing mechanism consists of 132 hammers in front of the print positions and a looped print chain containing the characters whirling behind the inked ribbon and paper. As the correct character passes by each print position, the hammer fires and strikes the ribbon and the paper against the print chain. No, the print chain does not stop!
	Examples of punched cards. Both programs and data were punched into decks of these cards.
	Learning about the IBM 7030 (The "Stretch") mainframe from volunteer docent (and CS 160 instructor) Ron Mak. This mainframe was introduced in 1961 with a transistor-based 0.5 MHz CPU and up to 256K 64-bit words of memory. It was the supercomputer of its day and stretched the limits of computer engineering.