C/PMuseum Tour
This area of C/PMuseum is currently under construction, when finished it will appear
as a map of avenues and streets on which each exhibit can be found. Touring
the museum can be done by selecting destinations directly from the map, or by "strolling"
the various themed avenues, which run North/South. The crosswise streets provide
chronological divisions, so the northernmost part of the neighborhood begins at
75th Street (since the main exhibits start in 1975) and continues south to 86th
Street, which marks the end of the main exhibits.
The main exhibit avenues are as follows:
8th Avenue – The neighborhood starts here, at the intersection
of 8th avenue and 75th Street, beginning with
8-bit S-100 systems. Later exhibits
include the Cosmac (1802), and some other CP/M based 8 bit systems
such as Osborne and Kaypro, and also Sinclair beginning with the
ZX-80 and progressing thru Timex.
There's even an
HP-85. This avenue also includes the venerable IBM
PC-XT 5150, 5160, and
5155 portable, which were 16 bit machines trapped in an 8 bit bus, and
the
PC-AT, which essentially marked the end of the 8 bit evolution
and the beginning of the domination of MS/Intel.
Commodore-TI Highway – This begins in the days of Texas Instruments programmable
calculators, and Commodore's first PET 2001, and follows both companies thru their
evolution into home computers, Commodore through the 64 and
VIC-20, and TI through
the TI/99.
Console Drive – Residing here are exhibits of the evolution of
TV game consoles into home computers. Early exhibits include Telstar (pong) and
the infamous Atari 2600, which later carried Atari into the computer age with the
Atari 400 and 800 platforms. Also included are Coleco's very robust, but less than
successful ADAM, and some toymakers attempts at computing in the form of Intellivision
and Aquarius. There's also some neat computer watches exhibited here.
Tandy Road – Tandy's computing history also starts early in the
neighborhood with the
TRS-80 Model I, and continues through the business-machine
Model II, and
Model I evolutions, the
Model III, IV, and IV portable. Tandy is one
of the few companies to successfully make the switch from marketing proprietary
system to PC clones in the early to mid 80's, although no examples of those are included here. Tandy also
made a wide variety of portable and pocket computers, the
PC-1,
PC-3, and
Model 100
being among the models exhibited here.
Apple Lane – Showcases Apple Computers beginning with the prototype
of the original
Apple-1, through the
][,
][+, and
///, and continues all the way
through Lisa and early Macintosh. Apple
is the only company of all the early players that remains today with a non-Wintel
architecture and software base, and due to my extensive exposure to Macintosh over
the years Apple Lane continues into Apple Lane Extension past 86th Street, simply
because I have Macintosh PC's that I have personally owned from the late 80's and
90's (my first was an original 128, acquired in March 1984) and so I choose to make a special
place for those systems in this collection, even though I do not generally collect anything
newer than 1986*.
*There were originally also plans for a
PC Circle, to show the
evolution of Windows and the PC, but because so
many of my memories of working on Wintel systems over the years have been bad ones,
associated with turmoil and crashes, I have decided, at least for the moment, that
this collection will not contain any Wintel hardware, and beyond the IBM PC XT and
AT, which deserve honorable mention, Wintel PC's will generally be excluded.
(This is, after all, my
personal collection.
:-)
Leading up the neighborhood is the
Alley of Antiquities, which
is a stroll up from the pre-history of digital computing to the beginning of the microcomputer
age in the early 70's. Included are photographs of the original Eniac, some IBM mainframe tubes and original Univac Core Memory, a 14 inch disk platter, and even a punch card reader and punched cards, as well
as some pre-digital examples like the Digi-Comp mechanical computer and the Calculo
analog computer,
and Logix-600 learning computer. (And of course, a Teletype Model
ASR-33.)
(MAP UNDER CONSTRUCTION)
While the map (and the neighborhood) construction continues, in celebration of the
30th anniversary of Apple in April 2006 the northernmost end of Apple Lane has been opened
to allow access to the first two exhibits:
Apple-I Prototype
Apple-I
You may feel free to access those exhibits by clicking the above links. (Sorry
for any inconvenience, the map is
coming soon...)
Curator's Footnote: One final avenue I would very much like to construct,
for purely personal reasons, but unfortunately lack any building materials whatsoever,
is
Cado Avenue. I have a very long career working on Cadosystems
hardware, beginning with the original late 70's "40 Systems" with Pertec and Winchester
drives and Teletype Model 40 terminals and printers, continuing through the 20's,
CAT
I/II/III and Tiger 64/32/16/8, Cados, and finally all the way through to the demise of AUOS in
Y2K. The only functioning remnant I have is a Versyss labeled RS/6000 from the early 90's (that
still runs VAE to this day) and I still have my hardware technician certifications
for the CAT and Tiger 64. I would very much like to have some hardware examples
around which I can expound my memories of 8 bit IL interpreters, 256 byte programs,
and the general innovation that George Ryan and Cadosystems provided to create a 4 user
disk enabled business ready multitasking operating system on an 8080 with 16K of RAM, at a time when many other 8080 based
systems were just one step past switches and lights.