CS Department Computer Museum Pictures


to Department History main page

conduit! article on Computers in the Museum

The current CS Computer Museum is under the stairs on the 4th floor of the CIT. Tom Doeppner is the curator.

The display and box on the left is an Apollo DN300, acquired in late '82. Next to it is Munin, a Sun-2 acquired in mid-'84. The display to the far right and box is one of our first Apollos (the 5th machine shipped by Apollo), a DN400.
Evans & Sutherland PS 300.

The machine on the left is Simale ("Super-Integral Microprogrammable Arithmetic and Logic Expediter"), 1975-82. To the right is Nancy, a VAX-11/780, 1979-88.
On the left is part of our Ramtek 9400 system, acquired in late '79. The display is on the table and the rest is on the floor below. The next display and box is Fritzi, a Sun 1 acquired in late '82.The second display from the right is Dumbo, a Symbolics Lisp machine (model 3640) acquired in early '85. On the far right is the rest of Dumbo, underneath the Macintosh.

(LEFT) This mockup of a Dynabook was created in the early 80s by a RISD artist who worked for Andy van Dam in the Graphics Group. It was part of an ONR project to mock up a futuristic electronic manual for repair and maintenance. It anticipated tablet PCs and was based on Alan Kay's vision of a Dynabook and the Graphics Group's own work on electronic books. They mocked up a highly dynamic ebook for maintenance and repair of sonar gear made by Raytheon on the Ramtek display, and took a screengrab for the mock-up.
(ABOVE) Sitting on top of the big Digital VAX-II/780 are three oblong wooden boxes. This image was taken looking down into the top one. It is the SSTARC (Stein, Stabler, Turrentine Automatic Relay Computer). The SSTARC was used for a demo in a lecture in AM100, which became CS100. It showed the workings of a computer as it went through a simple computation. At the very end, there was an overflow (it would produce a number that was one bit too big). The overflow bit was attached to a flare, which thus went off at the end of the lecture. Eugene Charniak was the last person to give that lecture.