Historic Computers

The Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California is home to two rebuilt IBM 1401 Mainframe computers. These prehistoric monster computers were a business staple in the 1960s and 70s. Instructions were entered on these behemoths by punch card and the data was stored on spools of tape.

Robert Garner, one of the technicians who has spent the last decade rebuilding the computers, says that the old computers are like a time machine. "When people are here, experiencing this, it sparks their imagination. It transfers them back in time, but it also takes them forward in time. It makes them feel like they too can build new things."









I often reflect on how technology has advanced just in my lifetime, I remember the first cell phone that my parents owned. It was a copycat of the Nokia "brick."



10 years later my phone is essentially a small computer. 






Seeing how far computing has come since the 1960s makes wonder what lies ahead.