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Issue link: https://digital.macdirectory.com/i/1505412
The Computer History Museum in the heart of California’s Silicon Valley takes a very broad view of computing, recognizing that people have been creating tools to help them count things for a very long time. As you would imagine, walking through this labyrinth of history, means spending most of your time in the twentieth century and later. What you learn, however, is that there is a very clear, occasionally convoluted, and utterly fascinating path from the abacus to AI. Down Memory Lane Computer geeks don’t always make the best history buffs. It’s so easy to forget what is behind you when you’re obsessed with what’s ahead. But it’s that rapid pace of change that makes technology’s history so fascinating. It took most of those 2,000 years for mankind to go from an ingenious set of beads on rails to mechanical systems that could do much more. Just off the entrance hall is a room dedicated to a milestone machine that represented a turning point in computer history, Digital Equipment Corp.’s (DEC) PDP-1. Until its debut in 1959, running a computer still meant, at best, loading stacks of cards and waiting for the results to print out. The PDP-1 and the software it ran allowed for something brand new: interactivity. It was controlled by a keyboard and, for the first time, a CRT display. Being one of the first of a generation of minicomputers, it fit comfortably into a reasonably-sized room and didn’t require a team of operators to keep it running. It could run a text editor and primitive word processor and even one of the very first computer games. What’s more, CHM’s PDP-1 still runs and the museum occasionally fires it up for live demos. Now that's a keyboard!