A work log has been added to the site. Work on the museum progresses every week, but it’s not always something as exciting as acquisition of an important piece of hardware or writing a nice article for the blog. Most of the time, it’s just plain work. So I’ve created a work log to record the efforts in order to gain a little more visibility into what’s going on at the museum.
The Terminals Wiki is a wiki devoted to the computer terminal. I have created this wiki to collect in one place all the information on computer terminals, including links to manx and BitSavers as appropriate. Prior to creation of the wiki, information on computer terminals was sprinkled throughout various sites on the web. Like most wikis, the Terminals Wiki is a work in progress, but it now has a fairly broad sampling of terminals and over time more details will be filled in about each specific terminal.
Weird Stuff in Sunnyvale, CA has agreed to donate a Tektronix XD88/35 workstation to the museum. Thank you, Weird Stuff!
A gallery page showing pictures of the collection has been added to the main bar above every post on the blog. Click through the thumbnails to see large detailed pictures of the museum’s collection of hardware.
Things are getting organized down at the museum and soon I’ll be able to post some pictures of things as they stand. Moving everything to our new location in October was quite an ordeal and it’s only now that things are nearing completion as an organized display of the collection and not just a bunch of items in storage.
BitSavers is a preservation archive of documentation and software for vintage computers. It is run by Al Kossow, who is the software librarian for the Computer History Museum. BitSavers is a wonderful resource for both historians and collectors of vintage computing. You can subscribe to an RSS feed for the documentation or an RSS feed for the bits to be made aware of new additions to the archive. Two recent additions to the archive shed some light on early computer graphics products.
Vintage Computing systems are often sought out by film and television crews to be used as props during filming. Starring the Computer is a web site devoted to sightings of computers in film and television. Recently while watching an episode of Fringe, I noticed a Basic Four terminal lurking in the background as Walter Bishop opens a dimensional doorway to a parallel universe.
The Museum has one of these Basic Four terminals in it’s collection. The terminal dates from the mid to late 1970s and is interesting in that it does not use a microprocessor for it’s control circuitry. The logic of the terminal’s display and editing functions is implemented entirely in discrete logic using 7400 series parts.
Welcome to the new home of the Computer Graphics Museum!
With server space graciously provided by Jay West, we now have a new home for the Computer Graphcis Museum on the web. We’re starting out with a simple blog to report news about the museum and articles on the history of computer graphics.