Visiting the Computer Museum of America

After VCF East, we were invited for a very special visit of the Computer Museum of America, near Atlanta, Georgia. Comes with us for a tour!
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[@computermuseumofamerica]

Thank you for stopping by to see us Marc and Ken! What a fun visit!

[@AiOinc1]

I've still gotta bring my Quantum scale by to donate.

[@StreuPfeffer]

Give Marc a key to this thing, a blank cheque book and time. stuff will start working, even if not intended to be run again :D

[@oldnotobsolete.2925]

Everything about the museum shouts love, thought and passion about the history of computing.

[@bradnelson3595]

Master Ken is such an asset to have for these videos.

[@TrainDriver186]

Indeed. Only thing to change would be to fit him with a wireless mic.

[@docnele]

Ken would agree to be special museum guide for international nerd VIPs as long he is paid in vintage chips.

[@tomkavulic7178]

Imagine how intimidating must be to work for a museum and have Ken and Marc walk up, each of whom has forgotten more about your artifacts than you were ever taught.

[@LongBean7]

That's what I was just thinking! That poor guide!

[@SeanBZA]

@@LongBean7 More like the guide is getting the best ever training, and this will go to the patrons as soon as they open the next time.

[@Gkuljian]

It was fun growing up in Silicon Valley during those early years. In 1972 we used to ride our bikes up to the Stanford artificial intelligence lab, and play the games they were developing, along with other things. And the Homebrew computer club. I just took it all for granted.

[@KeritechElectronics]

Too early to play Global Thermonuclear War through an IMSAI... Cool story :)

[@SubTroppo]

A museum is one thing but the anecdotes that people such as Ken can tell are another thing altogether!

[@MichaelOfRohan]

There is more history in that museum than in 10 kens combined!!

[@SubTroppo]

@@MichaelOfRohan I suppose it comes down to what one prefers, the objects exhibited or the real unvarnished stories of what led to their production.

[@russellhltn1396]

Hats off to the guys who transferred their collection while they were still around to do so. I'm sure many collections have met ignoble fates at the hands of the family just trying to clear things out.

[@BlazeFox89]

"I threw out all of the old keyboards, no one needs that many" so many commodores and old IBM keyboards, and a functional Juno 6 to top it off. I appreciate people who can and do get their collections into safe hands.

[@theharbinger2573]

I live in FL, that place is not even that far. I could go revisit all my old HP calculators. 35, 45, 65, 97, 41, 15, 28 and finally, the one I still use 48G and the only other one I have that still works is the 15C. Thanks Mark and Master Ken for the tour. Algorithmic interaction complete, end of line.

[@CuriousMarc]

I still use my 15C in the lab!

[@ximalas]

I use my 48GX, in both physical and virtual forms, and I prefer that one over my two other HPs, the 35s and the Prime.

[@FrancSchiphorst]

@19:20 YEAH! My first computer (ZX-81) i plucked a lot of tomatoes to buy it :D

[@GuruJSGamingIsFun]

It was my first computer to. Did cost an awful lot of money for 1K. Got the 16K expansion and learned the hard way about the wobble effect (the connector between ZX81 and the memory module was sensitive. If moved you lost everything, not fun after a long programming session. It was the start of my IT career.

[@Tromador]

Same. Blu-tac for the rampack.I delivered newspapers for mine.

[@FrancSchiphorst]

@@GuruJSGamingIsFun I skipped the 16K and moved to the Spectrum. Even bought a floppy drive. Lots of fun to get the tape based programs on floppy. Not enough space in memory so copied most into high memory, part in the video ram then booted a small piece of assembly to copy the video over my basic code and then call the correct routine to start the program. With the move memory block operand of the z80 it was just a couple bytes to do that last bit so hid that somewhere in the print buffer (or somewhere over there ;) Loads of fun.

[@gustinian]

Anyone recall Monster Maze 3D ? - one of the very first (if not *the* first) 3D POV Games. A genre-instigating 'horror survival' computer game with a convincing T-Rex hunting you. I still remember the hair-raising terror of it chasing you down a corridor. Nightmare fuel. Amazing what illusions could be achieved on a 16k ZX81. The ultra realism of the upcoming 'Stalker 2' horror survival is the latest incumbent of this legacy - hard to believe the progression. My father bought the ZX81 for Omnicalc's spreadsheet but I recall typing in a Space Invaders in 1k (!) listing for Basic before we eventually got a 16k wobble pack clone.

[@scsirob]

You do realize that your beloved ZX-81 is in the 'Modern Stuff' section of the museum ;)

[@krandall5285]

This was great! You know you are doing it right when you have the respect of actual professional curators. It is rather like Time Team getting the nod to dig world heritage sites. Marc, you and your team have earned well deserved credibility in this field. Thank you so much for all the amazing content!

[@donmoore7785]

Wowsers! This is a tremendous collection, and so attractively presented. The contributors of this equipment and parts did a great service by making them available. Thank you for the tour.

[@daicekube]

WEEEE! A Datapoint 2200 data entry machine! Worked with those - programming in Databus on the 3800 ARC and then for the 6600 with Datashare and multiports. And we hade a code generator called ISIGEN that allowed you to mix ISIGEN commands with Databus and get a Databus complete program depending on parameters you gave it. The 80*12 screen is "funny" in that it's a card image. Punch cards we all too common back then. Two cassette decks on top; one for the program you wanted to run and one for the data. We also used DP 2200 as a controller during off-line printing data from our SPERRY UNIVAC 1100 mainframe . The 2200 ran a tape drive and also the big SPERRY UNIVAC high speed belt printers! Oh! Nostalgia! ;)

[@comchia4306]

I love the Computer Museum of America! I make a visit there every year, as part of my birthday Atlanta visits. I especially love their working TRS-80, and writing BASIC code on that machine. I even have a couple punchcards that I got there last year.

[@contentedbuddha]

Goes into the museum, tells the director more than she would ever want to know about her expositions😂

[@KeritechElectronics]

That's learning from each other - it's a two-way street. I love it that way, being both teacher and learner, it brings back the memories of my time at the Book Art Museum (Lodz, PL) where I learned the ins and outs of the Monotype hot metal typesetting system. I could go on talking people's ears off on that, while learning new things all the time, especially when a retired operator visited us. Not a place for ego-driven know-it-alls, haha.

[@TheDiveO]

My father brought home a ZX81 in Autumn of '81, with a 16K RAM pack, from his business trip to Systems Fair. He opened up a whole new universe to me. He wanted to get me in touch with this technology, but was totally blown away by the results he caused...

[@MarcelHuguenin]

By Jove! My jaw was on the flour for a full 20 minutes! What an amazing collection! I can imagine your hands were itching seeing certain objects! What a great opportunity Marc and Ken! Thank you for sharing with us.

[@campbellmorrison8540]

If I were to ever get to the US this is first on my list. Wonderful collection, thank heavens for people who have had the foresight to collect this stuff

[@zh84]

Every time I see the front panel of a DEC PDP I think how lucky I am to have learned programming at a time when I didn't have to toggle in the boot loader of the computer in binary every time it was switched on. And talking of switching on, the one sad thing about this museum is that all the computers are off. The Living Computer Museum allowed people to run their systems, but alas, it has just closed down. I daresay that to run all those Crays and supercomputers would require a dedicated power station, but it is a shame nobody can bring these machines back to life.

[@hoplessnoobe1583]

Some of the cooling systems on those use chemicals that are also super dangerous. The Cray-2's cooling used Fluorinert which can be super toxic if handled wrong. And the sheer amount of Freon used to cool most of those early cray's would be insane to get running.

[@dabb1ng223]

Amazing place, and great video. I'm sure that I'm not alone in being in awe of Ken's knowledge. It would be so wonderful to be able to hear more of his comments. Would it be possible to acquire an extra mic sometime?

[@bobpockney]

The nostalgia is overwhelming. My career laid out, from PDP-8 to Cray, Sun and SGI.

[@UnixGoldBoy]

Glad to see a video of this place. There just aren't enough good walkthroughs on KZbin of their entire collection yet, but that seems to be changing. Can't wait until they open their entirely new area on the other side of the building.

[@raymitchell9736]

That's a fantastic collection... I can only imagine how much fun these people are having restoring these old computers... I wished I could be there and help out too!

[@robertsharp781]

Marc.. I thank you immensely for sharing your experience. That shot of core ropes at 18:21 literally took my breath away. Such thoughtful effort is all too rare to manage a glimpse of nowadays; - my considered thanks to all who made this video a possibility.

[@RowanHawkins]

I know of one person in the North East who had his basement wired specially so that he can power his PDP 8, 8e, 11 and 12. He also has 2 datapacks (the washing machine sized drives with replaceable platter stacks) both ends of paper tape..punch & read, some LA120, and lots of bound paper documentation.

[@growingknowledge]

What an awesome place. I'm in awe of your knowledge.

[@MagnusOsterlund]

18:36 Until recently we had two such machines at work as well as a Modcomp 9250. Nowadays we run the MAX IV operating system and the programs in an emulator that emulates the Modcomp hardware. It was sad when the old Modcomp machines went for recycling, but we saved the switch panels

[@AiOinc1]

No way! I live only about 2 hours from this museum, visited before. I volunteer sometimes!

[@chriholt]

Man, you would never be able to get me out of there! Thanks for the mini tour!

[@HenkvanHoek]

This is so impressive. To see this collection makes me go back in time.

[@jonathankleinow2073]

My dad worked at Datapoint for a few years in the early 1970s and had a Datapoint 2200 at home that he used for his technical support job. He moved to Sycor in 1974 and worked there for four years, creating a custom version of the Sycor 440 for Yellow Freight here in Kansas City.

[@CTSFanSam]

20 minutes of visual goodness. Thanks!

[@siberx4]

Wow, the presentation and layout for this museum is phenomenal! What an excellent collection, with everything from the famous to the obscure. Beautiful clear graphics and wall murals, too!

[@albertsandberg]

With a name like "Computer Museum of America" you better not disappoint and man it seems like it delivers on every point! Wonderful!

[@Chriva]

On the subject of LCS. Megabytes doesn't sound like much but when you do the maths you suddenly realise you need more than 8 million ferrite beads just to reach a single meg. It's mind boggling just to think about how many wires you'd need for that

[@AlexanderWeurding]

What a share sir! Thank you!

[@gnudarve]

I'd go for the Cray hardware alone, everything else is icing on the cake!

[@ifitsrusteditsmine]

Ken knowledge is infinite

[@MacLimitRange]

The Programma 101 from Olivetti was the first Personal Computer, there is no doubt on that, at historical level, we are talking about the Computer that help NASA going into space, without it, it would take so much more time, going to then moon. Thanks, Pier Giorgio Perotto for inventing the first Personal Computer.

[@princesswalt4010]

OMG, a SGI Challenge! I had a Challenge XL when I worked in a post production house in San Francisco in the mid-late 90’s. It was an Alias Wavefront (later became Maya) render server. My goal was to get it to run past 100 days without it crashing. I hit 99 days once! I loved the display on the front panel which showed bar graphs of the usage of each CPU - if I’m not mistaken, the XL only had 12 CPUs!

[@ocularpatdown]

I’d love to visit this museum, but that means setting foot in Georgia.

[@andygeppert]

That IBM 2361 LCS trove of core planes looks amazing!!!!!!!!

[@gort59]

My homebrew Paperclip Computer is there and will be on display in the future. Built to scale from the vintage book “ How to build a working digital computer “, I am so excited!

[@nicksantos43]

That Thinking Machines CM system at the end is always a dazzling sight! Reminds me of Jurassic Park which is still the greatest vintage computing movie ever. Thinking Machines CM5, Quadra 700, Sgi Crimson, SGI Indigo Elan...

[@SynaMax]

Not only do they have a Xerox Alto, an Apple Lisa, and a NeXTCube, but they have a freakin' COMPUTER SPACE?! That's the very first coin-op video game! 7:08

[@MattandDonna]

19:27 That's udderly amazing right there.

[@joshbodner4834]

Good timing! I just spent the day at the Computer History museum in Mountain View and found myself saying "oh I recognize that from Marc's videos!" multiple times

[@stuartbridger5177]

You know you are getting old, when kit you worked on turns up in a Museum. Good to see the Sun Micro stuff

[@mikefochtman7164]

Love seeing that someone is preserving this bit of history.

[@RobWVideo]

[adds Atlanta to upcoming US trip plan]

[@mikebarber1]

I've driven past this place every day heading to work and never knew it existed. I guess I should go for a visit.

[@carpespasm]

I've been a couple times, it's a candy store for anyone who likes this channel.

[@alm3333]

I had no idea. This is in my backyard!

[@marks93cobra]

Thanks for this, I will be adding this museum to my list of museums I plan on visiting!

[@gustinian]

Impressive and important collection. So when are Marc and Ken (and Usagi) going to visit Bletchley Park across the pond? I'm sure plenty of UK nerds would be only too happy to put you up...

[@ptonpc]

Looks like a fantastic place :)

[@SidneyCritic]

7:08 RMC made a blue replica of that green cabinet by 3D printing sections and glueing them together, and got it working as a full arcade cabinet game.

[@voidstar1337]

Great tour! So much real estate, hope it can last. Designate it as a Shrine! I imagine in 100 years, "B.C." will come to mean Before Computers. It really is a great collection there, both on display and in the backrooms. And important to keep the history and stories behind those systems. Really great to see a LINC-8 there! So many treasures. Hopefully collaboration with the public can help maintain the stories over time.

[@mikefochtman7164]

Lots of folks vie over the CRAY and PDP line (and of course IBM). But I worked with a different branch of computing regarding real-time monitoring and control systems. There, SEL (Systems Engineering Labs) computers were 'king'. With real-time interrupts and their propietary OS with hard-interrupt priorities, they were used in SCADA systems, system monitoring and real-time simulations (flight sims, military tank sims, nuclear plant sims, etc...). A whole micro-industry around the 'SEL-Bus' tech and hard-ware interfacing (we had literally thousands of digital input signals and thousands of digital output controls, along with often close to a thousand analog output control).

[@thesteelrodent1796]

love how Ken just knows everything about these old machines =D 6:00 the IMSAI 8080 of course possibly more famous for being Matthew Broderick's computer in the original Wargames - even though everything they showed on his monitor ran off a different machine, the IMSAI was only there for decoration

[@neilbryan6507]

Master Ken certainly knows his stuff.

[@Evergreen64]

The company I worked for in 1983 had one of the Pixar cubes. One of the first I think.

[@directive0]

So cool! What was it used for?

[@Evergreen64]

@@directive0 We used it to composite images from laser disks. The laser disks had analog video images on it. So you could de-clutter maps and just see what you needed to see.

[@RaceDayReplay]

Nice to see the Sinclair ZX80 and ZX81 at the end

[@jayglenn837]

Seeing stuff like this really reinforces my idea to get into a career of computer history. I wanna be the research rat on the team that writes the books chronicling all this stuff. I wanna help dig old machines out of corners & clean them off so someone more knowledgeable than I can teach me how to identify & repair them.

[@williamsquires3070]

(@7:51) The absolutely jaw-dropping fact is that one could hide a Raspberry Pi inside that model of the tape drives and it would have more computing power than most of the machines in that museum, combined! How time flies, and transistors get smaller. 😌

[@douro20]

The IMSAI 8080 was the first personal computer to be sold as a complete system, with terminal and floppy based storage.

[@Ashene64]

I've been here a few times, these guys are great and they take care of their machines.

[@stephano6793]

15:18 his eyes couldn't get any wider😆 I can almost see the dopamine.

[@wimkuijpers1342]

In 1979 the Motorola 6800 processor was born. As a pinball mechanic, that meant that I had to completely retrain.

[@Hey_Its_That_Guy]

The 6800 came out in 1974, the 68000 was out in 1979. I wrote bytecode for the 68000 for FADEC (GE aircraft engine controllers), back in the day.

[@TheSwanies]

This reminded me that museum preservers are beautiful people

[@RickBaconsAdventures]

Oh boy, that's my corner of the US, I will definitely be visiting!

[@ntsecrets]

6:48 I have a working Osborne 1!

[@owensmith7530]

I have a friend who has two in his garage. No idea if they work.

[@rydillo]

That cow is so cool!! I would love to try and make something like that on a smaller scale

[@j.t.johnston3048]

Thanks for sharing. I had no idea this existed only a few hours drive from my home. I think an excursion will be in order.

[@rolfdieterklein]

fantastic museum, look for the next episode. -- by the way in Oldenburg Germany Computer Museum, you can see some of my work on my NDR Klein Computer (1986...) , but it never made it to USA.

[@bigsarge2085]

Awesome!

[@TheFleetz]

Just like two kids in a candy store! 😀 Amazing collection of history goodness!

[@TecKonstantin]

17:14 Cool, my dad did work with this terminal and later iteration for mechanical Desing, when they moved from paper to CAD. Would be so cool seeing such things work again.

[@TecKonstantin]

A quick response when i showed him the Picture "3D not so much. Only 2D. I think I worked with it a generation before that, also later ones. It also looks more like a calculation engineer. It was more comfortable later for me with 3d. We also started relatively late with 3d, because we got along quite well with 2d for mechanical design, but 3d meant more effort. So computer costs and time to enter everything. But 2d was faster because less data was needed. Later we had a tableau to draw on, it was much more convenient than pointing on the screen, but we had problems when switching because we were constantly poking at the screen automatically with the pen. It took a year to get used to it."

[@JeffBilkins]

Title should be "Computer Museum of America is visited by Ken and Marc" Anyway, amazing collection and the presentation looks very fresh and modern.

[@leaveempty5320]

Ken, best chat-up lines ever.

[@JacGoudsmit]

The most impressive part of the video as far as I'm concerned is that they seem to have thousands of square feet of unused space. Obviously they just got started as a computer museum 🙂 It's almost as big as Marc's basement!

[@sophya5796]

Love how they made sure to have a Kenputer and also a Markputer available for our honored visitors ❤

[@greenbriar07]

Thanks for the museum & behind the scenes footage, there's some amazing technology and artifacts preserved there (and an art cow!) Makes me really happy to see them displayed so nicely there :)

[@herbertsusmann986]

For some reason none of these computer museums have much in the way of Data General Nova or Eclipse machines. There is one early basic Nova at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View CA but that's about all I've found so far. I used to fix Novas and Eclipses back in the 70s. They were very solid machines and were mostly used in the small business world for accounting/word processing/ etc...

[@CuriousMarc]

The System Source Museum has Bob Rosenbloom Novas on display kzbin.info/www/bejne/aJnKpnqPpqt7g6c

[@jamesburgess9101]

14:38 its offcial name is the Pixar Image Computer, nice to have!

[@herbertdaly5190]

Wow! That's amazing...

[@HomeComputerMuseum]

Looks great! Maybe we'll use some of the ideas here :)

[@hardweird]

What a fantastic collection! Was that a glimpse of live CM-2 in the end?

[@owensmith7530]

What a super museum!

[@flynlr]

caught some Zx80 right there at the end .. the Timex Sinclair 1000 was what I learned basic on.

[@bobvines00]

The CMoA is definitely a nice place! I've been there two or three times in its current location and its previous previous location The current location is a very much nicer place. I look forward to when they feel that they are ready to start having running machines for visitors to experience!

[@AlonsoVPR]

I wish I could work there!

[@JamesHalfHorse]

I didn't know about the place. I will have to look into it the next time I am down that way.

[@mikeselectricstuff]

19:03 I had one of those space-age looking calculators, but it wasn't branded Panasonic like the one here.

[@KeritechElectronics]

Nice! :)

[@justethical280]

Ken is on another level.

[@kencarlile1212]

Strange, I so often think "that belongs in a museum!" and yet... some of that stuff belongs in Marc's lab! I mean, the museum can have it back after it's working...

[@AsbestosMuffins]

genuinely did not expect this in atlanta

[@AmauryJacquot]

yet another good address added in my book

[@MaDeX-k2w]

Come to Bletchley Park in UK, I would drive up there just to meet you guys as I'm in awe if your work.

[@John_L]

More precisely, come to the National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park. Lots of working computers including a rebuild of Colossus.

[@stuartbridger5177]

@@John_L Great museum, did make me feel old. Walking along the row of exhibits and saying to my wife "worked on that, worked on that, installed those", etc.

[@MaDeX-k2w]

@John_L sorry thank you John, that's what I meant :)

[@colombianguy8194]

This is just Amazing, the first place i want to see when i visit the USA, greeting from Colombia!!!