Thursday morning – History of computing

Grabbing a few secs between meetings to put up soem pictures from yestradys visit to Riga.. I’m pretty swamped to day between the IBM Forum I’m doing here with clients… and media stuff (eg. 6AM TV show , 8:30 talk.. , university talk, another talk, two interviews).. All good stuff. .but keeping me very busy on top of a big project for my day job.. I’m pretty beat..

Anyway.. back to yesterdays trip to Riga

Fish for breakfast.. i know I’m in the north of europe !

After my IBM talks and Media stuff, I went to the Latvian Technical University for a talk.. I think there were about 300 folks there. it was really great meeting these students. I was the kick off ot heir engineering week.. I wish I could have hung out to talk to them more..

one of the high points of my trip so far was a special short tour that my friend Ugis arraigned for me to visit the Technic Museum in Riga.. There Andre, the museums 80 year old wonderfully warm and knowledgeable curator took me on a tour of his collection crammed in the 5th floor attic of the Technical institute. In there was a beautifully layed out history of computing in eastern Europe.. He had everything from 1950’s vintage vacuum tube flip flops to modern computing elements. The high points ere the Russian copies of early IBM 360 and 370 machines and Bulgarian versions of DEC PDP11’s. it was amazing to see. The collection is a treasure.. that I suspect few get a chance to see .

Andres display of calculators. and mice.

 

A russian version of the Apple II

 

an early russian printer

Collection of early PCs

Old component test station

Card reader frame

old switching components

hand calculators

Model of first electronic calculator in russian total memory was 150K bytes !

the brains behind it.. don’t you love this pic !?

picture of the real thing

early print outs

danger.. high voltage (fist computer had 800 volt supply) looks like Fearless leader from Rocky and Bullwinkle.

Core memory planes

acustic digital delay for printer

Logic board for tube computer. (with germanium diodes !)

 

paper tape (cut by hand)

early drum memory

 

audio tape recorder retrofit for data .

crazy Swedish tape machine

front panel of ECIM IBM clone  russian duplicate 370 processor.. the hilight of the show for me !

the crew who built it

early computer art

psuedoselectric

removable disk drives

Another surviving IBM clone console.. so cool !

the guts.. !  Discrete ECL logic !!!

 

some sort of test console..

 

Bulgarian DEC clones

oops a lightning strike !

 

 

 

An old ASR 33 (I used ot have one of these !!!!)

 

great tour !.. I was so pleased to have spent the time with Andre !!!

 

OK.. now I’m in Vilnus .. about to head to the University for a talk.. More tomorrow.. with pictures from here..

Nite all, nite sam

-me

 

 

2 thoughts on “Thursday morning – History of computing”

  1. j,
    loved the photos from the computer history museum. Some stuff looks so familiar.
    also much that illustrated that engineers the world over have much in common.

    i wonder if there was a Soviet version of adventure?

  2. Awesome! Technology is developing at such a pace, and old things are so much seen as without value, that we risk that the potential museum pieces from our era are just lost… Great to see that there are a few who preserve.

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