Silicon Valley

I spent the day both yesterday on today down in Silicon Valley.

Yesterday I went to Mountain View and spent most of my time at The Computer History Museum. They've recently taken delivery of the second replica of Babbage's Difference Engine (the world's earliest design of computer - completely mechanical) from The Science Museum, London where they built it - and where you can see the first replica. They're quite excited about it and were giving demonstrations. It's quite amazing to watch it working.

They've also got part of an ENIAC the world's first Turing complete, programmable electronic computer*; part of a SAGE (think War Games); a Cray System 2, one of the earliest super-computers; and numerous early personal computers, calculators, main-frames and minis. They didn't have the Acorn Atom, one of the computers I wanted to see, on display though. Apparently they do have one in their collection but it's at a warehouse off site.

I also visited the nearby Googleplex, HQ of that super-power which runs half of The Internet (Blogger included) and The Mozilla Foundation, who make the software which you can access The Internet (and Google) with.

Today I explored more of the valley area, including Sunnyvale (Yahoo!, Palm), Cupertino (almost entirely owned by Apple), Palo Alto (HP, Stanford University) and San Jose (Adobe Systems, eBay, Cisco Systems, Intel, AMD, Nvidia, etc.). I invested in some junk from the Apple Company Store at their HQ.

My flight home leaves at 16:50 tomorrow, I think I'll head back into San Francisco in the morning - see if I can get that cable car ride.

Oh, I forgot to mention last time: There was an earthquake here a couple of nights ago. About factor 4, so the same strength as we had a few months ago, but it only lasted a few seconds. And no-one round here blinked or cared.

*Although they're peddling it as the world's first programmable computer, but of course that wasn't ENIAC it was Colossus - the World War II code breaking computer at Bletchley Park, England. And ENIAC did not use a binary numeral system (like all modern computers) when Colossus did.