Visiting the History of Computing and Play

Over the past month or so I had the chance to visit two fantastic museums: the Large Scale Systems Museum (near Pittsburgh) and the National Museum of Toys and Miniatures (Kansas City). These museums showcase the twin histories of computing and play. These areas intersect explicitly when it comes to games, but also much more informally, as playfulness is something that has long been part of the world of computers and novel technologies are vital for opening up new avenues for toys. Or maybe I’m just trying too hard to make a connection between these two places and they simply are very much my jam and were fascinating to explore. Either way, I’ve included a very large number of my own photos from my visits below, along with some annotations of what I got to learn about and see.

Large Scale Systems Museum

LSSM is a museum of computing history that is entirely volunteer-run and visits are by appointment only, which provides it both an exclusive and deeply enthusiastic feel when visiting it. And I’m pretty sure I first learned about it through a map I found online of places where you can see Cray supercomputers displayed publicly (by the way, for another experience, I highly recommend Marcin Wichary’s thread and photos from his recent visit to the museum as well).

The first floor of the museum is mainframe and large-computer-focused, while the upstairs is full of early personal computers (the latest ones are of the BeBox and NeXT vintage). And I was in heaven. I had a fantastic guide who gave me a tour was excited to show me so many treats, from a personal computer that can play Pac-Man in ASCII to a vector monitor display that also involved—if I remember correctly—information from punch cards.

There was even a computer created by Singer Business Machines, a division of Singer, the company that makes sewing machines. So much history and odd path-dependent contingency is bound up in that little fact!

What else did I see?

Well, there was the machine that inspired the look of the computers on Severance:

There was the Three Rivers PERQ, which was developed in Pittsburgh and used ideas from Xerox PARC:

Here is an abbreviated history of floppy disks in a single photo:

Snoopy on a vector monitor, as well a short video of an animation on this kind of display:

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