The Computer History Museum

When I hear people say what ails the tech industry is engineers not getting enough liberal arts or just art in their education, I feel like someone’s been watching Revenge of the Nerds, lately. No one ever says, if only those Wall Street bankers had liberal arts educations, or if only those politicians had taken more art classes. And I’ve been cheated by more artists than programmers.

Nevertheless, I opinionated in a previous article that programmers (and everyone else) would benefit from a history of computing in their studies. I got a refresher on this recently at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, near Google HQ.

Natually, it’s pro-software, so don’t expect an exhibit on the impending AI apocalypse here.

The building and the courtyard in front are lovely. You can just hang out here and enjoy the Bay Area weather (it’s near the bay). Especially considering the admission fee, like everything else in the Bay Area, is a bit pricey.

Or you can check out the gift shop. They have some fun stuff there.

This is my second time there, so I wondered if it was worth it, but they do have new exhibits, in this case a display on modern video games. Blizzard was high-profile here.

And even among the regular exhibits, there’s enough that you’re probably not going to absorb everything in one go. It starts way, way back to the earliest of computing.

Which for me would be these three PCs (literally — these were the first three PCs I programmed on, in order from left to right).

And my first Mac laptop (from the Sculley years, so stop bashing him!).

I didn’t remember them having such a good collection of video game hardware.

I didn’t remember the robot section, either.

Even the beanbag makes an appearance.

One disappointment: I didn’t see any mention of the women of Bletchley Park in their section on Bletchley Park and Alan Turing. But they do have an entire area dedicated to Countess Ada.