Field Trip to the BugBook Museum

My team (Rackspace http://mycloud.rackspace.com/ - I do not represent or speak for the company or team) goes on team outings to celebrate things.

 This week we went out for lunch with David Larson and then visited the Bugbook Historical Microcomputer museum where David told us about his long an not exactly intentional path into writing computer books and collecting computers. He's very into Ham radio, old farm gear, and collecting things. His computers have helped in litigating cases, and in general are a great history lesson.

You used to have to do so much just for some simple computing power! There was only a small bit of things on display because the location was so small, they will soon be moving to a location twice as big but still will not be able to fit everything there.

If you know of a museum that wants more items for computing history have them call, he is interesting in getting things good homes where people can see them! 

Apparently running a museum is expensive and maintaining a display is even worse so he can not even donate to places as they often do not have the funding to research and setup a display with donated items. The exception he said is a silicon valley computer museum that has plenty of money and an amazing display.

I had never seen a slide rule before, and there were some crazy early calculators, and an collection of tubes (co worker also informed me apparently antique soviet tubes are now a desired item for sound amps) I am so glad technology has shrank and become more user friendly since I have gotten into computers. I knew about punch cards, tape, large floppies, etc but I never knew cassettes were used!

He wrote about our trip in the blog here: http://bugbookmuseum.blogspot.com/2014/01/computer-museum-big-visitor-day-with.html

We got to see some of the warehouse, the nice things (Original Apples) are kept in a bank vault not the storage space because of their value, so don't get too excited.


































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