Computing Aladdin's Cave - Computerphile

Key Takeaways

okay we're in the front room the first room in the center for computing history which is a museum in cambridge full of lots of old retro computers from around about 1960 to present day so if you come with me let's have a look around so in the front room we have various different things going on here we have apple ii over there we have some of the original macs we have an ibm pc in the corner but this is kind of just a sort of a little introduction to the main event which is the main gallery down there we try and get people in with some of the interesting arcade machines we have over here and so on before bringing them on to the main stuff street fighter 2 here is always very popular people go straight for that it's great when we have a kids coming in they come straight through the doors over there and they're just straight over to this corner of the room the game's over there before they even see that we've got the main gallery next door they quite like looking at the old mobile phones too particularly the massive briefcase style ones that we have over there they're always good fun we have an oculus rift in the next room along there which you can see someone enjoying at the moment but uh yeah if we go through the main gallery now we'll show you the bulk of the collection so people often uh they come to the front and they don't expect this to be behind the building a great big warehouse essentially just full of old computers most of them we have switched on and playable we're trying to strike a balance at the moment between being a museum with interesting displays about the history and so on and just having it all there to see a big arcade essentially people just go and play on and enjoy and there are plans to do lots of new and interesting exhibitions in this space but we always want to keep that sense of it being somewhere just to come and use the old machines not just to look at them gathering dust and so on we want them to be used and enjoyed so yeah over here we have a lineup of various home computers stretching well the latest one we have here is the risk pc and we go back to the zx81 whenever we have school groups in here it's always interesting you say to them who's heard of this iconic computer none of them have it's it's almost sad but then you see the teachers in the background going yeah yeah i've heard of it they always get it and with the spectrum that we have over there as well they're the ones that uh that know what we're talking about when it comes to these old computers but uh it's good to introduce the kids to it as well there's a kind of link here as well a geographical link isn't it because we're near cambridge and obviously we do try and kind of tell a cambridge story yeah this is probably the best place to be in the country if you're going to set up a museum of computers there's a lot of computing heritage here yeah for instance we've done events we've had sinclair days and so on where we had sir clive sinclair here last year to do a kind of retrospective of his company in his career and so on um so yeah it's a good place to be if you want to talk about computers yeah okay and of course mentioning the risk pc absolutely yeah it's an arm machine yes it is yep arm are uh one of our main supporters here actually at the center so yeah we're very grateful for all their help they've been really good to us over the last few years um and they are again a very important part of the history of competing in this part of the country okay right let's go for a little wonder i think we've got kind of home pcs and so on here but the games consoles are probably the biggest draw in this room and we have those lined up just over here so yeah we try to not go too modern we don't want just to have ps4s and xbox ones in here we do have an xbox one upstairs um but we're saving that kind of special events and so on but the latest we go just day to day in the gallery is the playstation 2 over here about 10 years old is yeah the the newest we want to go really because otherwise yeah kids will come in and they'll just run for the things they know immediately rather than having a look at the historical stuff so yeah we've got all sorts we have ps2 we have the gamecube dreamcast 1064 ps1 and so on and then some slightly less successful consoles like 3do and we have of course pong you can't have a museum of computers or games without pong of some form pac-man over there as well if people want to play that and then around the corner we have even more including a nice bit of decoration we have a wall of cassettes here which is quite good fun a lot of people enjoy looking at that and trying to spot some of the games from their childhood i'm going to look for ghosts and goblins in a minute is it there i think this video might be quite long if we spent the next few minutes having a look to try and find it it could be there so over here as well we have yeah we have space invaders going on on the atari vcs the original mario the original prince of persia original mario kart so this stuff over here proves very popular as well when people come around the back and see this they're they're always having to go and it's really good to see that something like super mario kart is still as engaging as mario kart 8 is on the wii u there's probably not much difference if we had them lined up next to each other i think people would be playing both you know it's really interesting when you get younger children in and at first you think are they going to go for some of this stuff they do they really do good gameplay is always engaging and it's really amazing to see we kind of step away from the gaming side of things when we get into this end of the museum and we're going on to some slightly older machines now we don't have as much switched on down here partly because we are always testing we're always trying to get things to work there are repairs that need to be done and so on but also because as you can imagine the electricity bill in a place like this is quite high it goes up a bit but we have still have some interesting things over here we have uh sgi indigo overhead which is quite an interesting machine this one because of just the graphics capabilities of a machine like this in 1994. for its time um in the early 90s this is top-end kind of graphics production and so on it's this is really high-end stuff these are basically the files yeah it's basically just the the hard drive it's just some somewhere in the depths of the system and you can yeah fly through files oh that one it can't load up so let's see if we can't go back a bit yeah it's not liking it at the moment but yeah you can essentially you if you click on one file it will generate another little landscape of the files in there and the new folders and you can sort of click through and fly through the system and that's what they use in jurassic park it is yeah yeah it wasn't just dragged up by a script writer it was a genuine application it's a unix system i know this it's all the files of the whole park and that just hasn't quite stood the test of time really we had a few of these machines lined up our last retro gaming night which is an event we hold in here where we get loud get out loads more old machines from the archive and then we had four of these i think which in their day would have been absolute top-end uh desktops running really serious applications worth thousands of pounds at the time and we had four of them set up playing quake so some people might say that's a slight waste of computing power but that's how things work around here if we can have fun with it and play games on them we probably will um but yeah if we carry on down here we can have a look at some more some of the slightly older some slightly bigger bits of hardware we've got because although the story is focused on home computing here we try and cover a bit of the early days of computing as well so we have interesting mechanical calculators and so on over here we have some military machines that we've got lined up and then we have the very earliest complete machine that we have in the museum which is this minivac from 1961 and then yeah we have various old business machines and so on and mainframes like this computer here it's one of my favorite things to do on school tours when we can actually turn the elliott 903 on and show kids that computers used to run on paper not cds or anything like that paper was how you stored things is that your favorite part of the museum what do you like best it's well i'm i'm a gamer at heart that's my main interest in this place um i'm very tempted to go and pick up a ps2 for 30 quid somewhere and have a big retro binge at one point so yeah that kind of here a ps2 ps1 is my main thing but having done lots of tours and so on the elliot is my favorite bit of the museum actually it's just so much fun to switch it on we get it playing music and nuts and crosses actually on the screen which is always good fun and it's just such a fun thing to do on school tours particularly and guided tours of the museum is to actually have one of these really old machines up and running and working just as it did it's a really interesting thing to do here's the big reveal so this is the internals of our serial number three um and it's quite drastically different it has a simple circuit board inside just one circuit board with all the components on um and it had this connector at the back which allowed you to increase it to a massive 16k of memory with that ram pack