Image via CrunchBaseMicrosoft Co-Founder's Museum Forages Far and Wide for Digital Behemoths of Yore
SEATTLE—Microsoft co-founder and billionaire Paul Allen wants an IBM 7094. The elusive data-processing system was taken off the market in 1969 after just seven years and hasn't been widely used since.
It's Ian King's job to find it. (click below to read more)
Often clad in a kilt, and sporting a Grizzly Adams-like coiffure, Mr. King is traveling the globe in search of the 7094 and other obscure, often huge, old computer gear. The machines will stock Mr. Allen's appointment-only Living Computer Museum.
"I'm like a kid in a candy store," says Mr. King, who holds a master's degree in computer science from the University of Washington, and is working on his doctorate in the history of information science and the evolution of technology.
The museum is an homage to a particular slice of computing's past: machines that allowed multiple users to work on them at the same time, known as "time sharing." Mr. Allen is stocking it with gargantuan-sized mainframes and data processors from the early days of computers.
Also on Mr. Allen's wish list: 32-bit machines built by Interdata; and an Imlac PDS-1, a programmable display system, considered to be one of the predecessors of the modern-day computer workstation.
Mr. King is hoping to find them all. Some of the several-ton gear has been mothballed but remains in warehouses. Much has been sold for scrap—some old machines were soldered with silver and gold.
Mr. King, 51, who harbors his own old computer collection in his Seattle basement, began his current quest in 2008 after working at Microsoft. As part of the gig, he contends with circuitry littered with rat droppings and spider webs. He must convince sellers his budget isn't limitless, despite the project's financier, and that the machines really won't just end up in some billionaire's home, locked away from public view.
Mr. King declines to say how much has been spent acquiring the computers.
Mr. Allen attributes his interest in the old computers to nostalgia, in part. They are the tools he and high-school buddy Bill Gates used to write programming language that led to the founding of Microsoft. Machines such as an old teletype "are very dear to my heart," he says.
"They have a certain smell to them and a certain buzz when you hit the keys," Mr. Allen, 58, says. "It sure takes me back to those days."
Museum workers are hoping others will be as interested in the obsolete gear as Mr. Allen. It already has attracted a following by putting some of the old servers online so technology aficionados can play old-school, largely text-based games like Zork—or otherwise access the computer dinosaurs—just for fun. Students and computer junkies stop by to view the collection by appointment.
With the aid of a microscope and 1960s-era manuals, Mr. Allen's team—including Bill Rupp, Rich Alderson and Keith Perez, who also designed the computer-control system on Mr. Allen's submarine, Pagoo—has painstakingly resurrected many of the old computers to working order.
The barebones room housing them looks like the set of an old science-fiction movie, with lights blinking and giant disks spinning on the machines. When turned on together, they emit a dull hum and an occasional squeak from a malfunctioning cooling fan.
A special elevated room had to be created to coil the machines' cables, thick as silver dollars, underneath the floor to avoid tripping hazards. Mr. King and colleagues have tried to modernize the power supply for the old gear, but it still sucks up thousands of watts of energy. The team takes care to ensure everything is preserved, even old hand-written notes taped to the machines by original users.
Mr. King practically frolics through the old gear. "Over 30 Ph.D.s were earned on this machine!," he says, pointing to a 1965 PDP-7, a "minicomputer" with cabinets about 6 feet tall and weighing 1,500 pounds that he obtained from the nuclear physics lab at the University of Oregon. The sprawling machine has less computing power than a modern mobile phone.
To find old computers, Mr. King sifts through eBay and tech groupie online forums. A Pittsburgh insurance company donated an old Data General minicomputer called an Eclipse. A 600-pound mainframe came to him from a computer hobbyist who kept it in his bedroom.
Mr. Allen says stocking his Flying Heritage Collection, a museum with World War II-era planes, was easier than finding some of the machines for the computer museum.
The hunt has more than once ended in disappointment. A few months ago, Mr. King thought he had finally nailed the IBM 7094, built for large-scale scientific computing. When it emerged in 1962, it was a leap forward in internal processing speeds—its power is the equivalent of the computing power behind the control panel on a modern microwave. Back then it sold for about $3 million.
An email from a tipster alerted Mr. King that someone on a farm in South Australia had an old 7094 that a family member had saved from the scrap pile. Mr. King vetted the information as best he could from some 9,000 miles away. There were large farm implements resting on it, so parts of the 1,500-pound machine weren't accessible.
He set out for Australia, regardless. When the doors of the metal shed where the machine was housed were swung open, Mr. King was breathless. Despite having sat in a shed for 30 years, it was in terrific condition. He sifted through the wardrobe-sized cabinets that housed the circuitry and pored over the coding inside.
"I started getting a little nervous," he says. "I started reading off numbers, and they were the wrong numbers."
The machine was an IBM 7090, a mainframe that pre-dated time-sharing machines.
The trip wasn't a total bust. Mr. King ended up meeting with a computer collector in Perth who eventually sold him an IBM System/360 Model 40, first on the market in 1964.
Mr. King believes it to be the only one in private hands. "We have rumors of other 360s, no confirmations, and nobody's talking," he says.
And so, earlier this month, Mr. King was again in Australia, to oversee the packing up of that machine, which has disk drives the size of washing machines. It's due to arrive this month.
"It's going to be even better when we get it up and running," he says.
No comments:
Post a Comment