If you thought Windows ’95 was archaic, think again. And if you’ve ever wondered how our phones got so smart or how the Internet works, you’re in luck.
The Computer History Museum opened an exhibit this week titled “Revolution: The First 2000 Years of Computing“, which covers everything from the abacus to the iPhone to robots to the Internet. The comprehensive exhibit boasts 19 galleries with over 1,000 artifacts and 5,000 images, plus documents and interactive videos.
The exhibit is packed with both the interesting and the nostalgic. Visitors can see the monstrous the 1956 IBM 305 computer, which has 5MB of storage and takes up nearly a full room, or be reminded of simpler times by playing a game of Pong.
Other items on display include the Cray-1 Supercomputer, the world’s fastest computer from 1976 to 1982, and ENIAC, the first computer to run at electric speed, which was built during World War II. But perhaps one of most interesting artifacts on display is one of the first server racks used to power the Internet (see above). It’s a reminder that, at one time, the Internet really did seem like “a series of tubes.”
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