Slow day, Sunday.
Spent a couple of hours in Starbucks sipping coffee and typing up Saturday’s exploits. Most of the time seemed to be spent fighting the lack of Google wireless. The huge number of wireless lans that are visible makes me suspect there’s an issue for anyone not willing to crank up the power.
For the afternoon I popped over to the Computer History Museum and hooked up on one of the tours. Whilst none of history is particularly unfamiliar it’s nice to hear the slant given over here. The various exhibits cover the entire electric computing age but despite the fact that they do restore some pieces of equipment to a working state (they’re currently working on a DEC PDP 1, and are moving onto an IBM 1401 later) it is sad that most of the kit is just dead metal.
The one aspect of the older kit that was amusing was the size of the consoles, the hoards of lights and switches, the intimation of huge power at the flick of a switch (never mind the huge amount of power needed to run the thing) with the huge desk area in front to keep the relevant reference and operations manuals open.
But the one thing, more than any other, that all these big-iron consoles kept reminding me of was the parody of the M$ Surface, it’s a big-ass table.
