Let's Do the Time Warp Again - A Computer Museum

A computer museum opened in my town. (https://www.computermuseumofamerica.org) Literally in my town, Roswell, GA, a few miles from my house, not just in the greater Atlanta area. It turns out I know the founder/ primary collector of the museum, a little. Our sons are around the same age and played baseball and ran cross country on the same teams. I was very excited when I heard about the museum. My family thought I was crazy. (Not a new thought for them. :-)) In this blog post I will share about my visit. For me, the most fun part of this visit was the time warp of remembering the old computers which is why I chose the title. There were quite a few machines in the museum that I had used. My brother said that means we are old if our computers are in a museum.

Dear readers, I know you may be thinking that this does not directly connect to medical device software. That is true. However, the history of the computer is tightly coupled with the history of computer controlled medical devices. Without the advances in the computer there would likely not be medical device software engineers like you and me. For example, please consider this comparison. We are looking at the Nordic nRF5340 for one of our devices at work. It has 2 processors in the same package and does Bluetooth. The more powerful processor is a 128 MHz Arm Cortex-M33 application processor with 1 MB storage & 512 KB RAM. It costs around $5 in quantity and is smaller than a postage stamp. The museum has a Cray 1 super computer (1975) that weighs 5.5 tons with an 80 MHz processor, 330 MB storage and 8.4 MB RAM. It costed $33.3 M (2019 dollars) and it came with a circular couch you could sit on. It goes without saying that we could not make portable medical equipment at that price and that size.

Early Microcomputers

There is a row of the early microcomputers right by the door. There is an MITS Altair 8800. Unfortunately, I never used one of these. I was only 7 when they came out in 1974. This is a famous computer because a guy named Bill and some of his friends wrote a BASIC interpreter for this computer on paper tape and founded a company called Micro-Soft. When people started giving the interpreter away for free at computer club meetings Bill Gates accused them of theft. Maybe that early commercial spirit is why Microsoft is #3 in the world in market cap at $1.7T behind Saudi Aramco and Apple. (The book Hackers by Steven Levy has some good stories from this era.)

Other computers that were nearby I do remember using. My Dad had more than one Apple II. He worked in a school and Apple has always been good with schools. I know I wrote a few papers on the Apple II with AppleWorks. My school had early Macs too. I remember writing some sort of program on the Mac. Maybe it was a password stealer? My high school had a DEC PDP 8 that took cards too. The museum had a nice collection of DEC machines including a PDP 8.

Games

Computers are about games too. My friend Tom up the street had the Atari 2600 video game system that we played on his giant console TV. We mostly played Space Invaders and Asteroids back then. The museum had one with Pac-Man that you could actually play as long as you wore gloves. They also had an early Nintendo with Donkey Kong that you could play too. I played quite a few quarters worth of Donkey Kong on the arcade machines at the fair but not on the home console. The museum had an Atari 800 too, which Tom also had. We played Zork on that back then. The museum did not have the Atari 800 out of a case where you could play with it.

College Years

I will share just a few more of the sights to not wear on your patience. In college at Boston University I worked in professor Voigt's lab. He had a few computers including an IBM XT, and an analog computer. The computer I was asked to program was a DEC PDP 11. We made a dot raster display that lit up an old luminescent CRT at the right X-Y coordinate whenever the neural signal was measured. I am pretty sure I wrote it in C language. The PDP 11 was famous for the C language. Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson at Bell Labs wanted to write utilities for Unix for the PDP 11. The languages they had were too slow, BCPL, FORTRAN and the 'B' language, so Dennis Ritchie create the 'C' language that many of us still use today for our medical devices. Eventually they rewrote the Unix operating system in C for the PDP 11 making it one of the first operating systems not written Assembly.

If you are in the Atlanta area, I recommend the museum. It is only open on Friday and Saturday right now. There are some social events there too like Bytes and Bourbon which I am not quite ready for yet, pandemic-wise. They have done a nice job with the displays and have a life size Apollo lander replica with much space memorabilia. The displays of super computers were impressive starting with the Cray 1 I mentioned and including nearly every Cray as well as other super computers like SGI and a Connection Machine with its non-functional blinky lights. There is even a WWII era German Enigma code machine.