[Leica] Some artifacts at the Computer History Museum IMG:

[kanner at acm.org (Herbert Kanner)]

Fellow LUGers, 

I have been a volunteer at the Computer History Museum since 2003, starting 
as a documenter of artifacts. That is, in collaboration with a partner, the 
partner often being a paid staff member, we would enter characteristics of 
the object in question into a horribly complex database. Things such as 
dimensions, weight (if it was small enough to be picked up), place of 
manufacture, etc., etc., including all numbers that could be found on the 
object: model numbers, serial numbers, goddam numbers, you name it. Then we 
would photograph it with a point & shoot. 

One of the tasks for which I eventually volunteered was editing those damn 
photographs. Considering how foolproof a P$S is, I was just amazed at how 
badly some of the volunteers would handle a camera. Many of the pix just had 
to be thrown out.

After a couple of years of this, I thought it would be fun to become a 
docent. At the time, all that could be seen by visitors was in one large 
room, and the formal docent training was an hour in which they showed us 
where all the emergency exits from the building were.

In 2012 a brand new $20 million exhibit opened ($15 having been contributed 
by Bill Gates) and some formal docent training ensued, led by a lady who had 
trained docents at two art museums: Getty and Cantor)

I took a few pictures yesterday of museum artifacts. Not wanting to 
overwhelm people, I will post them two or three at a time, with a bit of 
explanation of what they are. The light in there is really weird, being a 
mixture of ordinary incandescent, window light, and deliberately colored 
light. Also, some, not today's, had to be shot at ISO 2600 (flash not 
permitted, and I've given it up anyway), so we'll see how good noise 
reduction is.

For today: 

The Babbage Difference Engine #2. This is a working machine, and we 
demonstrate it once each day that the Museum is open. There are two of them 
in the world; the other is in the London Science Museum. We are the only 
ones who still demonstrate it regularly, as a result of which it requires 
regular maintenance with occasional major repairs. What the machine does is 
by addition only, it evaluates seventh degree polynomials to seven places of 
accuracy--such polynomials can be satisfactory approximations to other 
functions such as logarithms and trig functions.

http://gallery.leica-users.org/v/herbk1/L1002678.jpg.html

The U.S. Constitution requires a census every ten years. That word does not 
actually appear there; it's called "enumeration". The purpose is to 
establish how many Representatives a state is entitled to. In the 
Constitution a (white) person counted as one, a slave as 3/5 of a person, 
and a red-skin didn't count at all. Now Congress in it's wisdom decided that 
if these guys were out counting heads, they might as well ask a few useful 
questions. The resulting data, in 1880, took seven years to process. Because 
the population was growing, the most optimistic estimate was that it would 
take eleven years to process the data in 1890. Herman Hollerith proposed a 
method of dealing with the data by using punched cards, which by no 
coincidence turned out to be the same size and shape as the currency at the 
time. Here is the machine which read the cards. The card was put on a 
platform and the handle depressed. Wherever there was a hole, a pin would go 
through the hole and complete an electric circuit. The counters that you see 
are like clocks, which a large hand and a small one. Each clock could count 
up to ten thousand.

http://gallery.leica-users.org/v/herbk1/L1002660.jpg.html

Here is a crude device that was used to punch the cards, a pantograph.

http://gallery.leica-users.org/v/herbk1/L1002662.jpg.html

After Hollerith retired, some investors who had already bought a company 
that made time clock and a calculating grocery scale bought Hollerith's 
company. Eventually they hired as CEO a guy who had been fired by National 
Cash Register. That guy got rid of the clocks and scales and eventually 
renamed the company International Business Machines, later renamed IBM. His 
name was Thomas J. Watson.

Enjoy,

Herb


Herbert Kanner
kanner at acm.org
650-326-8204

Question authority and the authorities will question you.