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But we are the history of computing!
Jul. 25th, 2012 10:04 pmAfter our long day in San Francisco, we felt we needed a gentle day to gather our strength for The Wedding; visiting the Computer History Museum in Mountain View would be fun, and we could check out the wedding venue (the Rengsdorff House, also in Mountain View) at the same time.
The Computer Museum has many wonderful things, including a real live (though not entirely authentic) Babbage Difference Engine, which we saw in operation, much handcranking setting all the pieces dancing through their sequence of steps. This was a thing to be marvelled at, but the real joys were more mundane: ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
durham_rambler had to be forcibly separated from the IBM 360, but not before he had explained every stage of its working ("...and this is where the punch cards go..."); I was rather taken with the miniature model, doll's house furniture sized, made for IBM sales reps to show to potential purchasers. And they have a Minitel terminal, the first I'd ever seen, just three months before it became completely obsolete. Some thought had clearly gone into making it easy to use, even for people with no keyboard skills At All; the keyboard was neither QWERTY nor AZERTY, but in alphabetical order, which made me very happy.
As we were leaving the museum we received a text from D. asking why he couldn't see his website. Probably just one of those things, we thought, and went off to discover that the Rengsdorff House really was as easy to find asklwilliams had promised, and that we weren't too late for coffee in the little tea shop by the lake.
But back at our hotel we discovered that D.'s was not the only website with problems; a whole bunck of them displayed a blank front page, though the rest of the site was still there, as was the front page when you followed the links from within the site. This was a clue to what had gone wrong, and enabled us to fix it, a couple of hours work for both of us using my little laptop anddurham_rambler's Android phone, feeling simultaneously irritated at this tedious repair work and smug at the living in the future which enabled us to do it. Not to mention a little jittery about what had gone wrong (eventually we discovered that our hosting service had done something unwise in the course of an 'upgrade').
By the time the job was complete it was time - past time, in fact - to go and meet two more wedding guests from the Coast Starlight in San Jose, where naturally we got lost again. Fortunately the train was half an hour late, so that although A. and C. were not expecting us, we were able to intercept them and take them back to our (and their) hotel.
By which time we were due at the restaurant where the wedding party had been dining, to scoop up the groom and take him out for a stag night - a token visit to the pub which served us a very palatable stout and, for those of us who had missed dinner, a very welcome helping of tortilla chips and avocado dip. Honour satisfied, we called it a day: after all, we had to be up in the morning for the wedding breakfast, and bright-eyed and bushy-tailed for the wedding itself.
The Computer Museum has many wonderful things, including a real live (though not entirely authentic) Babbage Difference Engine, which we saw in operation, much handcranking setting all the pieces dancing through their sequence of steps. This was a thing to be marvelled at, but the real joys were more mundane: durham_rambler had to be forcibly separated from the IBM 360, but not before he had explained every stage of its working ("...and this is where the punch cards go..."); I was rather taken with the miniature model, doll's house furniture sized, made for IBM sales reps to show to potential purchasers. And they have a Minitel terminal, the first I'd ever seen, just three months before it became completely obsolete. Some thought had clearly gone into making it easy to use, even for people with no keyboard skills At All; the keyboard was neither QWERTY nor AZERTY, but in alphabetical order, which made me very happy.As we were leaving the museum we received a text from D. asking why he couldn't see his website. Probably just one of those things, we thought, and went off to discover that the Rengsdorff House really was as easy to find as
klwilliams had promised, and that we weren't too late for coffee in the little tea shop by the lake.But back at our hotel we discovered that D.'s was not the only website with problems; a whole bunck of them displayed a blank front page, though the rest of the site was still there, as was the front page when you followed the links from within the site. This was a clue to what had gone wrong, and enabled us to fix it, a couple of hours work for both of us using my little laptop and
durham_rambler's Android phone, feeling simultaneously irritated at this tedious repair work and smug at the living in the future which enabled us to do it. Not to mention a little jittery about what had gone wrong (eventually we discovered that our hosting service had done something unwise in the course of an 'upgrade').By the time the job was complete it was time - past time, in fact - to go and meet two more wedding guests from the Coast Starlight in San Jose, where naturally we got lost again. Fortunately the train was half an hour late, so that although A. and C. were not expecting us, we were able to intercept them and take them back to our (and their) hotel.
By which time we were due at the restaurant where the wedding party had been dining, to scoop up the groom and take him out for a stag night - a token visit to the pub which served us a very palatable stout and, for those of us who had missed dinner, a very welcome helping of tortilla chips and avocado dip. Honour satisfied, we called it a day: after all, we had to be up in the morning for the wedding breakfast, and bright-eyed and bushy-tailed for the wedding itself.
