Friday night – back from baltics.

October 12, 2012 johncohn Leave a comment

Home again after a very busy week in the baltics.. 6 customer presentations, three university talks and a bunch of media things.. and then a full days worth of work in the evening with folks back home. It was a great trip.. I met so many wonderful people.. still I’m really beat… So beat in fact I can’t seem to type well enough to upload my pictures from Vilnius, Actually.. I think Photo bucket may be down.. with everyone’s permission I’m going to wait until tomorrow to upload them.. right now I just want to hangout with Diane and try to stay awake for an hour more or so so I can sleep through the night..

I promise to get those pics up tomorrow.

for now..
nite all. nite sam
-me

Thursday morning – History of computing

October 11, 2012 johncohn 2 Comments

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

Wednesday night (late) – land of my ancestors

October 10, 2012 johncohn Leave a comment

1am and just got to the hotel in Vilnius, capital of lithuania. Almost all of my great grandparents came from here. Its a cool feeling to be here. Ill get some pics tomorrow. For now, i need to get about 5 hours of leep. More tomorrow.
Nite all, nite sam
-me

– c from my iPad

Tuesday night – Tallinn/Riga

October 9, 2012 johncohn Leave a comment

Greetings from Riga.. life is better today.. my bag finally got here as I was leaving Tallinn.. I had a good day of customer meetings, media stuff and a nice talk at the Tallinn Technical University. The Estonians are very cool. they’re quiet .. and very smart and gracious. My impression is that they have the strong Eastern European math/science academic skills and kind of Scandinavian focus on Design.. It’s a cool combo.. and it seems to be working !

I didn’t get out much today.. but I did get some good Hotel window shots

The University was nice.. i enjoyed the students question.. unfortunately.. we had to run at the end to get back to the customer event.. so I didn’t have time to talk to the students.. but fun, just the same

saw this sticker on a car in the parking lot.. thats me baby.. a mood mess !

the IBM event ended with a 40th birthday party for IBM Estonia complete with a Marylin look alike doing the ‘happy birthday Mr president’ shtick. pretty .. uhhh.. interesting !

trip to Riga was quick.. made quicker because I was traveling with new friend Martin.. used the time to get some work learning in.. Got to Riga.. and lo and behold.. My bag is there !!.. complete with my folded up hoola hoop !

got to the hotel and was shown around by Zene and her crew. one gave me a traditional Latvian carrot and potato thingy.. yum ? I think ?

I had a work call to get back to so I took a quick walk around the beutiful old city by myself. it’s really very beutiful.. but in a completely different way than Tallinn is beautiful !