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We were also introduced to some massive governement computers of the time, created for defense purposes and were in full serving till 1975 ("my favorite part of it is the built-in... ash tray" Randy said). Another interesting machine was a computer created by a student of the Wisconsin uni in the 50s/60s, and for the last few years was forgotten in the basement of a house where the son of the owner was shooting at with his... gun ("his son seemed to be in guns a bit"), so the computer has a few holes... Other interesting artifacts was an all-analog computer, and a big Johniac (not all of it was saved) where the company which had it has threw it outside of the building next to dumpster. Out of complete luck, one of the... architects of the computer was... driving by and he saw the computer sitting out in the sun in LA next to the dumpster. He thankfully was able to save the front of the computer and donate it to the museum. The museum also had on display a supercomputer built by Intel, sporting a few hundreds of Intel CPUs all working in SMP mode.

More supercomputers followed and we got to see 2-3 models of super computers that came out before the '70s, and then of course, was the CRAY experience. The museum has on display the CRAY-I, CRAY-II and the unique CRAY-III (only one was built) all side by side. It feels great to be standing next to the whole range of the golden era of CRAY. Really beautiful, powerful and outstanding computers.

At last, we got around to see the desktop history, starting with the first home computer of 1971 ("that no one knows about"), then the Altair, an Apple I (signed by Woz himself), Xerox Alto and Xerox Star, an Atari, an IBM PC, a TRS-80, an Osborne, an Amiga, early Sun workstations, SGI workstations, Apple II, Classic Mac, Apple Lisa, Apollos etc. There were also an Apple Cube, a 20th anniversary Mac, a NeXT Cube, and a BeBox.

There were a lot more items but they are too many to mention them all. In fact, the museum is preparing on utilizing more of the building and bring on display more items which currently are sitting unsorted in their storage room out of public sight. An important matter I would like to mention here is the donations one. Although the tours for the public are free, the museum needs donators to get it going. People can donate either money or artifacts. A lot of well known people have already helped financially the museum (e.g. Dennis Ritchie (C and Unix), Dave Cutler (VMS and NT architect)) and many companies as well, like Intel. The museum needs the support of IT companies, like Apple, Microsoft or IBM to grow, so if people from these companies are reading this, I hope they are going to help out financially and otherwise. Regarding artifacts, the museum has clear instructions as to what needs to get donated and what's not. One thing is though, the museum mostly has US and Japanese technology, so if you have any UK, German, Russian or other rare computer artifacts, consider donating them to the biggest computer museum of the world.

All I have to say is that I had a great time in the museum and I highly recommend you visit it too if you are living in the area, or if you are passing by. It is definitely worth seeing, it is part of history and for an hour, you feel that you become part of that history too. A must-see for all friends of technology.

A semi-offtopic note: The Australian museum of computing needs your help or its artifacts might end up in the streets.

The "Kitchen Computer"	The Z3 computer, a significant part of computing research	The Cray-1
Cooling unit for the Cray-2	This small and... wigged computer is the one and only CRAY-3	All the three Crays in the line
Another super computer, done by Mr. Cray before he founded Cray Inc.	CRAY I	Xerox Alto
PDP-8. Check on the reflection for the license plate of "UNIX"	Digital's PDP-11	Big hard drives
The Osborne 1	Sculley's Powerbook (ex-Apple CEO)	IBM S360
The head of a huge hard drive	Altair 8800	Apple-I signed by Woz
The CHM building	The CHM sign	Light-based art from the reception

All pictures were taken by Jean-Baptiste Queru. Thanks JBQ.

1. "Computer History Museum, Page 1"
2. "Computer History Museum, Page 2"