A Visit to the Large Scale Systems Museum

http://www.righto.com/2019/10/a-visit-to-large-scale-systems-museum.html?m=1

by fortran77 • 7 years ago

57 14 7 years ago

Now I feel old. I've worked with some of those things.

chiph• 7 years ago

Me too. We had an Eclipse MV-8000 in college (the subject of The Soul of a New Machine [0]) and it was a nice computer.

Later I worked with AS/400s, first the beige racks, then the all-black models. Still a nice machine today [1], and if you want something to run a mid-sized business "lights off", you should consider it.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Soul_of_a_New_Machine

[1] Somehow, IBM hasn't managed to fuck it up

jcadam• 7 years ago

When I was a kid, they did a family day at the facility where my mom worked... saw a Cray-2 actually in-use (it's a very distinctive machine, hard to forget). So, I'm pushing 40 and just old enough to have seen some of these things outside of a museum :)

jkoberg• 7 years ago

Holy crap Google Photos is annoying. Would much rather just have a link to a JPEG

skybrian• 7 years ago

Good stuff! Also, if you're near Mountain View you should visit the Computer History Museum.

sciurus• 7 years ago

This is neat!

If you're near Atlanta, check out the recently opened https://computermuseumofamerica.org/

They have the largest collection of Cray supercomputers in the world, plus lots more.

mzs• 7 years ago

earlier https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21208477

EvanAnderson• 7 years ago

This looks really cool, and it's only a 4.5 hour drive.

As an aside: Is anybody familiar with a curated list anywhere of interesting "geek" tourist destinations? Just today I've seen this museum and the "rotary jail"-turned museums [1]. I would love to plan road trips around these kinds of attractions.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21337410

jaaron• 7 years ago

Sounds like a great doc to start on github and source contributions.

Nzen• 7 years ago

I recall some interesting suggestions on the thread about Trinity Nuclear Test site open house [0]. Perhaps you could visit Fermilab. Strictly speaking, though, all museums are 'geek' destinations (just primarily history/art oriented).

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19568145

geephroh• 7 years ago

And check out the Living Computer Museum if you're in Seattle (https://livingcomputers.org/). They have a ton of systems you can play with including a CDC 6500 and a DEC PDP-8e.

thrower123• 7 years ago

When I was a child, I visited the computer museum in Boston, and have very fond memories of it. I dearly wish it still existed in the same form today, I would appreciate it so much more.

FullyFunctional• 7 years ago

If I'm not mistaken, the thiveing Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA, is where everything from that museum moved to, so no(?) artifacts were lost. I can personally recommend it.

dmix• 7 years ago

Is there anything like this in Ontario?

I came across this one recently, but it's closed apparently: https://pcmuseum.ca/

I went to an awesome one in Croatia that had tons of stuff: https://www.tripadvisor.ca/Attraction_Review-g297516-d362915...

The large scale concept is a great idea.

A Visit to the Large Scale Systems Museum

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