Computer History Museum

Some snaps from a visit to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View.

	Let's start at the beginning - Babbage never managed to build his Difference Engine II, but the Brittish Museum did a few years back...
	...it is an incredible piece of machinery in iron and brass...
	...and is considered by many to be the first computer.
	Moving forward in time quite a bit, a WWII vintage analogue bomb site computer.
	This valve based computer looks rather space age - probably because it is!
	Another valve based machine. This is just a small part of a machine that would have filled a large building!
	I love the round screens on this console.
	The innards of 60's vintage machines are not tidy!
	The valves are gone, but a HUGE number of indicator lights and dials have taken their place. Still no keyboard though!
	When I was going up the word "Cray" was almost synonymous with "Super Computer". Look at that mass of wiring...
	Cray are still building supercomputers today.
	A later Cray YMP - we had one of these in the department when I was at University.
	An icon in terms of home computing - the first ever Apple 1.
	The first computer I programmed on - a Sinclair Spectrum. I still remember seeing it for the first time in the living room and being astounded that this tiny thing was a computer!
	The name Pixar is usually associated with animated films, but they also built specialist graphics processing hardware in the early days like this "Image Computer".
	This brings us right into the internet era - this is the first hardware rack built by Google, cobbled together from off the shelf parts and designed specifically for reliable, scalable search.