People become attached to their old computers-some people more than others. Michael Williams is very attached to his. A long-time collector and one of the most prominent computer historians, he has just been recruited to turn a motley collection of obsolete machines-currently sitting in a warehouse at NASA鈥檚 Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley-into a world-class museum. With gems such as the 1965 Honeywell kitchen computer, which required a two-week course to learn how to use, and the Cray 2, which used artificial blood plasma as coolant, how could he fail? Catherine Zandonella meets him among his hulking mainframes and panels.
Why should we bother preserving old computers?
They are part of our technological history. We have lost the sense of how difficult computation was. Just as people鈥檚 handwriting goes to hell in a handcart as soon as you give them typewriters, their ability to add up long columns of figures seems to vanish as soon as you give them calculators. Calculation is one of the most difficult intellectual problems we encounter, and consequently it is worthwhile preserving some of the background of how we tackle it.
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What do you love about computers?
They are so complicated. I remember an old professor I had who, when I asked him why he liked computers, said they are like pipe organs. They are magnificent, complex machines. At that time, his answer resonated with me because I am also a pipe organ nut. Indeed the more I looked around, the more I found that a lot of the very great computer scientists share this fascination with pipe organs, and with complex machines in general.
You started your career as a computer scientist. How did you become a historian?
It started when I was a graduate student at the University of Glasgow in 1965. We had just moved into some renovated houses they鈥檇 cleared for offices. One day while making a cup of tea, I looked in the kitchen cupboards and discovered they were full of old computer books. The books had belonged to the head of the department, and he鈥檇 obtained them from a British computer pioneer named L. J. Comrie. I pulled out a couple of books and found one that was written by the British computer inventor Charles Babbage in the mid-1800s. Before long I鈥檇 forgotten all about the tea.
Do people become personally attached to their computers? Do you?
Oh, absolutely. Most people form a very strong bond with the first machine they use, particularly if it was prior to the PC period. If it was a very large machine that required its own room, the experience of walking into that room and sitting down and pushing a button and having the computer produce a result affected some scientists very heavily. Sometimes we get visitors to the museum who point out the first machine they ever worked on. They can shut their eyes and reach out with their hands and find the buttons automatically. They鈥檝e obviously formed a real attachment. I certainly get emotional about the first computer I used, an IBM 1620 made in 1959. But nowadays I am more into functionality than anything else, and if a computer isn鈥檛 doing what I want I am quite ruthless about replacing it.
Do you think people treated their machines like humans?
Yes. People would describe what these machines did in anthropomorphic terms: the machine was talking to you, or it was spitting out information, or it was gobbling up your punch-cards. Most of the machines here have nicknames. There鈥檚 one named Bubbles. Bubbles is a Cray 2 computer built in 1985 by Seymour Cray, one of the great designers of supercomputers. It generated so much heat that Cray immersed the entire electronics in a liquid, which was in fact artificial blood plasma. The liquid would show through a rectangular window and it would bubble as it released the heat.
Are you interested in the people who made these computers?
I like the people stories more than anything else. I am very privileged because I come from a generation that has not only met but also worked with a large number of them. None of these people set out to change the world. All they did was set out to solve a problem, and in the process they came up with some magnificent ideas that ultimately ended up changing the world.
Which one fascinates you most?
There are probably a dozen that I am very impressed with. One of the earliest and perhaps the least known is a German fellow named Konrad Zuse. Konrad started as an aircraft engineer, but he wanted to find a way of making his calculations easier. His company gave him absolutely no resources-they thought he should just get on with using the slide rule. He and a friend started building a calculating machine in Zuse鈥檚 parents鈥� living room during the Second World War in a small flat in Berlin, using bits and pieces from tin cans. When the war ended there was a period of intense hardship in Germany when it was difficult to find enough to eat for your family, let alone build a computer, yet he struggled through that and did some very good work and helped build a computer industry in Germany. Then there was Grace Hopper, who worked on the Harvard Mark 1 and Mark 2 computers. The Mark 2 was located in an old building and it got so hot they had to keep the windows open. One time it simply stopped functioning, and it turned out a moth had flown into the machine. Grace had a good wit and she wrote in the logbook: 鈥淭he first actual case of a bug being found.鈥� Everybody has credited Grace with the first use of the word bug. That鈥檚 not right-the term predates Grace by 100 years-but her story has become a legend.
How do you find old machines?
Most of the time they find us. People will phone up and say, 鈥淚鈥檝e got an x-y-z in my basement鈥�. Most of the time we say, 鈥渢hank you very much, we have 17 of them鈥�. We also get donations from companies. Just this morning, Hewlett-Packard phoned us about donating one of their supercomputers. Unfortunately a great number of older machines have gone into the melting pot because the connectors in them were coated with precious metals such as gold and silver to prevent corrosion and they were worth a lot of money. We鈥檝e lost a lot of these old machines because we just weren鈥檛 fast enough.
Many of the artefacts in your museum came from a similar museum in Boston that went out of business. What makes you think yours will succeed?
The museum in Boston changed its focus to address children and the general public. When that happened, their bread and butter-people who were interested in technological history-fell away. We inherited their collections. Our mandate here is to create a museum for interested adults. We鈥檇 be delighted if people brought their children, but we are not looking for elementary school groups. There are a huge number of people interested in technology in the Silicon Valley. Some will be scholars and students who want to study our collection of books, manuals and photographs.
What are your favourite exhibits?
One of my favourites is our kitchen computer, which was built in 1965 for the Neiman Marcus department store. It looks like a desk containing a row of switches and blinking lights. It stands on a futuristic-looking pedestal and is painted in fire-engine red and white. You could buy this for the woman of the house for $10,500. It came complete with two programming manuals, a cookbook and a two-week programming course. The only way to get any information into it was by flicking binary switches and the only way to get anything out was to look at a row of blinking lights, so it was absolutely useless in the kitchen. They didn鈥檛 sell any of them, so this prototype is the only one like it in existence.
Didn鈥檛 some of the machines have to be rescued from dire circumstances?
Yes, for example our bullet-ridden WISC-the Wisconsin Integrally Synchronized Computer. A famous computer pioneer named Gene Amdahl designed it in the early 1950s. When it finally became outdated, one of the computer science professors put it in their basement. His son liked to shoot pistols at targets, which he placed on top of the computer. So we have all these bullet holes in the front of the machine. Then there鈥檚 the Johnniac, named after computer pioneer John von Neumann and built by the Rand Corporation in Santa Monica. At one time it was being displayed in a museum in Los Angeles, but the museum eventually decided to get rid of it. It was unceremoniously cut up and hauled off to the parking lot to await the garbage collectors. You can see where some of the major cables have been severed. Someone noticed it sitting in the parking lot and sent a crew round to salvage it. We鈥檝e managed to get some of the people who built the machine to come in and restore it.
What about this huge contraption with all the vacuum tubes?
We have on display here one-third of a SAGE (Semi-Automatic Ground Environment) computer. If we had the whole thing it would take up the entire building. During the cold war, the US Air Force was concerned about Russian bombers flying over to North America, and SAGE鈥檚 main job was to track incoming aircraft. It turned out to be enormously reliable, so the Air Force kept using SAGE computers long after commercial computers with transistors and integrated circuits became available. This particular model came from North Bay, Ontario, and was operational until the 1980s. By that time, spare vacuum tubes were unavailable in North America. They had to be bought from Czechoslovakia. It was a bit ironic that North America鈥檚 air defences were being repaired with Eastern bloc parts.
Is it possible the general public doesn鈥檛 care about these machines?
It is certainly possible. In fact, members of my own family don鈥檛 much care about them. Some of my children think Dad is a bit peculiar. We hope by the time we have our exhibits up, there will be something of interest for everybody. Obviously it is not going to be everybody鈥檚 cup of tea, but we hope to have exhibits that will appeal to the average person as well as technological nerds.
Isn鈥檛 there something rather sad about collections of old computers?
It is sad that some things that were once so useful are no longer being used, but it is much the same as, say, a museum that has a display of butter churns. It is sad that women aren鈥檛 sitting in farmhouses churning butter any more, but most people really appreciate the modern luxury of being able to go and buy a pound of butter. Just as it is worthwhile to have examples from our cultural history of butter churns, it is worthwhile to have examples from our technological history.