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thewhitelily) wrote2010-04-06 02:38 pm
Travels in the USA: Day 2
We were pretty darn tired last night. At one point in the very early morning, I decided to track down my watch and check the time in the light from the crack in the curtains. It was 10am. Oh.
So we dragged ourselves out of bed, managed to partake of the hostel’s free breakfast before it closed at 11am, and were on our way to cruise around Silicon Valley sign-spotting. The Computer History Museum got, in our opinion, a 10/10 for awesome to warm the heart of any geek (a working Babbage Difference Engine?!?!!!!), while Google reported an unexpectedly low 0/10 for fun.
Thanks to our late start, we had to go straight to the Computer History museum to make it only five minutes late for the 12 noon tour. Fortunately, it was easy enough to catch up, because it was an excellent tour. The tour guide’s contention was that 1977 was the watershed year for computers, with the two Steves coming out with the Apple 1, and everything continuing from there. It was a great story and a fabulous tour, very different to the last time I went to the museum, and a completely different tour from the one Hubby had a couple of years ago when he came here on a separate occasion, but nonetheless dynamic. It was somewhat unfortunate that the museum was in the middle of remodelling, so they had closed a huge portion of their displays, including some rather special bits that I remember that included a book Hubby has on his shelf, the guidance computer from a cold-war era missile, and a mechanical loom from many many years ago that took various programs to give it the pattern to weave.
However, there was still plenty of fun stuff – the bicycle of a guy who had constructed it with the idea of having a mobile workstation he’d never have to leave and apparently pedalled 17,000 miles in it while maintaining a freelance writing and publishing business, and some sensational chess-playing computers, as well as the spectrum of advancements towards what we now know as the personal computer. We also saw a lovingly restored PDP 1, and a favourite I’d remembered from last time, which they did have on display was a Cray 1, which is built in a cylindrical container to minimise the maximum length of the necessary cross-wiring – because the breakthrough for the Cray 1 was that rather than using the minimum length of wire necessary to wire each connection, then having to implement some kind of queuing or reordering to synchronise the arrival times of each message, to use exactly the same length of wire for every single message and simply rely on them arriving in the order they were sent. This results in a massively ridiculous oversupply of wiring at the back, but a blisteringly fast computer. Win.
The most exciting thing we saw at the display, however, was a functional Babbage Difference Engine.
So, during the age when you used logarithm tables to calculate the position of ships, and logarithms were calculated by humans, who made mistakes, and copied by clerks, who made mistakes, and hand typeset by printers, who made mistakes, ships were lost at sea for the want of an accurate pocket calculator. Babbage decided to fix this problem by designing a machine to calculate log tables. In fact, it calculates arbitrary seventh order polynomials, which can approximate log tables well enough over ranges of about two thousand values, then you choose a new polynomial to approximate the next bit. And it printed the results both on a proofing sheet of paper, as well as stamping it into a tray of plaster, which could be filled with lead and then printed directly onto the paper to be bound into books. All entirely mechanically, driven by a man with a crank handle, who must crank exactly evenly despite variable resistance, or the machine will jam – it’s deliberately designed to jam before giving an incorrect result. Unfortunately derailed in the manufacturing stage, leaving only the plans for the eight thousand parts and how to fit them together, and the comment that ‘another age will have to be the judge’.
To celebrate the two hundredth anniversary of Babbage’s birth, the calculation core of the engine was produced by computer-controlled machinery programmed to incorporate a tiny range of errors to the extent that the toolsmiths of Babbage’s time could have produced. A number of years after that, a former CTO at Microsoft decided he would like one for his lounge room, and funded the London Science Museum to both complete their machine and build an entirely new one for him. At the moment, he’s getting his floor reinforced (the entire thing weighs 5 tonnes) and so it’s on loan to the museum. And it works! And we got to see it!
There’s only been two of these things ever made. This one’s usually sitting in the living room of some guy. And we got to see it. Now that’s pretty damn special.
Second stop of the day, having spent three and a half hours in the museum, was to get coffee for the seriously uncaffienated boys and also lunch. Then we drove on to explore the heart of Silicon Valley.
Google was our first stop, in the hopes that they might have some sort of engaging visitors centre to promote their image as the fun (not evil) company. Boy, were we wrong. We did find their campus (well, we’d programmed it into the The Colonel the previous night), but after driving around a little aimlessly for a few minutes, we got asked to leave immediately by security. Apparently, Google does not allow tourists of any kind, in any way. Please leave. Now.
Zero for fun, Google.
Nevertheless, we drove around to another Google building a few blocks away for a hasty, looking-over-our-shoulders sneak picture with a sign, then ran like hell. We spent the next couple of hours pretty much cruising for tech headquarters – we’d tried to think of who we wanted to see the previous evening when we had internet access to look them up and program them into The Colonel, but jetlag meant that we missed a huge number of places we kept thinking of the next day. And our experience with Google made us too scared to stop at quite a few places, too. In any case, we’re pretty pleased with our collection. :)
We finished up the day at Stanford (sorry, Rachel!) to have a wander around campus and a look at Steuber Field, the world-class Rugby field Hubby and I have both visited separately for different rugby conferences. And they were even playing rugby with a visiting NZ high school team, which was very special.
In search of a drink and with little open at the student refectory towards the end of the day, I managed to make a poorly advised purchase of the most foul grape flavoured fermented tea ever known to man, the taste of which was too horrible even to describe in words other than ugh. It turned out to proudly proclaim the presence of all kinds of bacteria and even a trace amount of alcohol, and so after about half a spat-out sip, I poured it down the drain and rinsed the bottle several times before refilling it at the sink in the bathrooms. It wasn’t even worth it for that. Ugh.
After returning back to San Francisco, we went out and hit the shops – Penski, it seems, is quite the shopper, and was keen for the opportunity to browse entire shops full of his favourite brand names rather than simply the occasional rack that’s made it to Oz, particularly since most of the shops didn’t seem to be closing at all for Easter, and seemed to be open quite late even besides that. We were particularly thrilled to spot an Australian Flag (left) outside Victoria’s Secret! Dinner turned out to be quite late, after that, and we made our way to Lonely Planet recommended farmerbrown wanting a quick eat and a sleep. It turned out to be a half hour wait for tables, so we made a booking for tomorrow night and moved on, searching the streets of the slightly dodgy area we’d ended up in for some kind of eatery.
Only one block away, we came upon Punjab’s Indian and Pakistani, which was awesome apart from the fact that my vegetarian dish came out at about Hot, when I usually cry for yoghurt at Medium and I was thus only able to eat a very small portion of it even liberally lashed with raita. Ah well, Agatha seems to like small meals at the moment, so it’s all good. Hubby manned up in a big way when I suggested he was boring for ordering a Corona with his meal, and decided to “Go the Monk”, which was a double-strength, double-size Indian “superbeer” that was essentially four drinks in one. He did finish the lot, and he didn’t need to be rolled home, which was a good thing, because the way back to the hostel was up a serious San Francisco hill.
He did, however, fall asleep very quickly, leaving me to sort photos, etc. well into the night. :)
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WANT.
Also, Stanford=awesome. Did you encounter any of the co-op culture while you were there?
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Nah, we had a wander around and pretty much left. So much to see, so little time!