Down in the Valley of computer archeology

Computer History Museum

This unassuming site's genesis in Marlborough began in 1979 as the private collection of Gordon Bell, founder of Digital Equipment Corp. It later moved to Boston's Museum Wharf and in 2000, it migrated west to Santa Clara, Calif., arguably the world's technology epicenter.

One exhibit, "Innovators of the Valley," focuses on such luminaries as Douglas Engelbart, inventor of the mouse (carved from wood with a single button); Bill Hewlett and David Packard, who began Hewlett-Packard in a garage in Palo Alto; and the two Steves - Wozniak and Jobs - of Apple fame. "Mastering the Game" chronicles the history of computer chess, culminating with a video of the loss in 1997 by world champion Garry Kasparov to IBM's Deep Blue.

The "Visible Storage" exhibit, heralded by towering shelves, is packed with early computers. On display are Asian abacuses and slide rules, and an exhibit on Joseph Marie Jacquard, the Frenchman who developed the programmable loom using a sequence of pasteboard cards with holes, the forerunner of the binary punch card.

Also on display are a space-age-looking kitchen computer for recipes (for $10,000 in 1964 index cards were a better bet), the first laser printer by Xerox ($100,000), and the first 1976 assemble-it-yourself Apple-1 (for $666.66).

Rounding out the exhibit are vacuum tube panels from the Sage System, developed by IBM for air defense. Twenty-seven of the computers, each weighing 300 tons, were installed around the country. A circular screen - with built-in cigarette lighter and ashtray - was monitored 24/7 to detect enemy aircraft. Vacuum tubes were used from 1954 to 1983. The United States stopped producing them in the '70s and imported them from the former Soviet Union.

The museum's organization of displays felt chaotic, but docent Allen Rozenzweig explained that by 2010 it will be expanded and better arranged according to eras, types, and technologies.

We returned to the lobby in time to see the demonstration of an automatic computing engine designed in 1854 by Charles Babbage. The machine was never built in his lifetime, but in 2002, faithful to the original drawings, one was constructed weighing five tons and consisting of 8,000 parts. The engine here is on loan from Nathan Myhrvold, a former Microsoft technology guru who helped finance the undertaking.

At one end a handle is cranked, engaging the gears. Columns of numbers and switches produce the numerical result at the far end, where it is printed out. Babbage was far ahead of his time. 1401 North Shoreline Blvd., Mountain View, 650-810-1010 , www.computerhistory.org. Free.

The Tech Museum of Innovation

A sure sign of a successful museum is one where adults seem as happily engaged as their children. The three floors of this museum in downtown San Jose offer something for everyone, including non-techies.

Many displays are hands-on, interactive, and fun. Striking images from the Hubble Telescope lead visitors to the Explorations Gallery, where they can examine a scale Hubble model and listen for sounds of life beyond Earth in an exhibit on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. At "The Transparent Body" exhibit a thermograph displays your heat image, and an ultrasound reveals the bones in your hand.

"Beyond Our Limits" explores technology that allows humans to better train for competitive sports and simulates and analyzes bodies in motion. We watched one child suit up in the gear of a professional hockey goalie and another power a racing wheelchair. "Deep Flight" offers virtual exploration of the museum's underwater tank in a mini-sub from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute.

Several times I returned to a huge globe that has an internal projection of weather patterns and ocean currents. It even depicts the spread of waves around the globe from the 2004 Indonesia tsunami.

We popped into the IMAX theater with an eight-story screen for an adventure with Lewis and Clark. (Best to sit in an upper row.) The images soaring over the Missouri River made me a bit dizzy, and the wraparound digital surround sound transformed the buffalo stampede into a visceral rumble.

At the "Quake Watch" exhibit, a US Geological Survey program hourly updates recent earthquakes onto a digital world map.

But the most fun was standing on the "shake platform" to experience re-creations of historic earthquakes. South Market Street, San Jose, 408-294-8324, www.thetech.org, $8 includes one IMAX admission.

Intel Museum

"You need to understand that the essence of a computer is essentially zillions of little on and off switches," says John Wittenberg, my brother-in-law and a consummate computer geek who accompanied me here. "Whether denoted by ones and zeros, punch-out cards, vacuum tubes, or silicon chips, they're all versions of on and off switches."

The Intel Museum, established in the early '80s to archive the nascent corporation's history, opened to the public in 1992. As it tripled in size it became a regional educational resource, offering classes in electrical circuitry, technology careers, product marketing, and binary code.

One of the 30 hands-on exhibits that explore computers' impact on work, play, and communications displays a full-size silicon crystal that looks like a silver cylindrical bombshell. Wafer-thin cross-sections of the crystal are sliced off, creating round LP-size disks.

During our self-guided tour John followed the instructions employees must follow for donning the proper attire before entering the Clean Room, where computer chips are manufactured. At another exhibit I pushed buttons and watched a graphic display of the sequence of multiple layers, etchings, and coatings each disk undergoes to create the grid of hundreds of microprocessors, eventually cut apart to become Pentium chips. The Robert Noyce Building, 2200 Mission College Blvd., Santa Clara, www.intel.com/museum. Free.

Bill Strubbe can be reached at bs billbs@yahoo.com.