Sunday we drove from Pacifica over to the Mountain View to tour the Computer Museum. Bill’s college friend Tom and his daughter toured the museum will Bill. The museum opened in 1996 with the goal of preserving and presenting artifacts and information about the information age, the computing revolution, and its impact on society through the years. It has the largest and most significant collection of computing artifacts in the world, including many rare and one of a kind objects.
There is a 25,000 foot square exhibition called “Revolution: The First 2,000 Years of Computing” which opened in 2011 and covers the history of computing through twenty galleries of displays with everything from the abacus to the internet. The galleries included “Calculators”, “The Birth of the Computer”, “Early Computer Companies”, “Analog Computers”, “Networking and the Web”, “Personal Computers”, “Computer Games”, “Mobile Computing”, “Computer Graphics, Music and Art”, and “Artificial Intelligence and Robotics”. One highlight is a working Difference Engine designed by Charles Babbage in the 1840’s.