HUGE Warehouse Tour, RI Computer Museum | 'Puter Smith - video Dailymotion

Red Cow Entertainment

We are taken on a huge tour of the warehouse and storage for the Rhode Island Computer Museum in Warwick, RI. We encounter IBM mainframes, CRT televisions, the Apple Lisa, and even a harrier jet.  The RI Computer Museum has lent antique technology to productions such as Severance, Halt and Catch Fire, Joy, Kong: Skull Island, Hidden Figures, The Good Nurse, and more.   Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/redcowentertainment  Merch: https://redcowentertainment.com/store/ ✅ Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYvgalxiHFL3uHANR0BC4Xg?sub_confirmation=1  Website: https://www.redcowentertainment.com  TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@redcowentertainment  Twitter: https://twitter.com/redcowent  Instagram: https://instagram.com/redcowentertainment  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/RedCowEntertainment ️ Red Cow Arcade: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJWaXzdM3BHjg3UYi-hyOPg

Transcript

00:00John where are we? We are at the warehouse of the Rhode Island Computer Museum. This is an

00:05incredible place. It is just a tremendous archive of all kinds of computing equipment dating back

00:11many many years. One of the best things about doing local content is that local fans will

00:16actually reach out and be like I do a cool thing. Yeah. You want to introduce yourself Dan? Sure I'm

00:20Dan Berman. I'm the director of the Rhode Island Computer Museum and welcome to Area 51 here.

00:26How many square feet are we talking? We have 5,000 square feet floor to ceiling with just

00:30old computers. We started collecting in 19, probably 96. We incorporated in 1999 and when

00:37we incorporated every state agency, every government agency, every school found us

00:43and started donating computers. Look at it they're always busy.

00:49And so Ray has been watching the channel for a few years now. Yes. So Ray tell us a little bit

00:54about you. Well I've been in computers since 1969. I've worked on mainframes, PCs, all different

01:00kinds of stuff and when I found this museum I lent my expertise here to repair computers and

01:05demonstrate things to the various visitors that we have coming in there. Did you tell me that in a

01:09past life you were a cinematographer or editor? I used to work in television broadcasting

01:161960. I worked at a channel 5 in New York City and at 19 I was nominated for an Emmy for editing.

01:22So we now have an Emmy nominated crew member.

01:28EJ I don't know that we need you any longer. Now that the forklift's out of here let's go

01:34see what the hell it is that they've gotten. It looks incredible. Got to strap a rope on

01:38because you get lost in there.

01:53So we usually like to start our tour with the Harrier Jet. So let's go down and see the Harrier

02:03Jet first. What that has to do with computers I have no idea. So we're constantly getting donations

02:08from people you know people that are just cleaning out their garages mostly and they'll say well I

02:13have this but it doesn't work. They say I don't care we need parts. You know I look at Facebook

02:17marketplace all the time and I actually do see vintage computers like going for pretty good

02:21money. We don't usually sell our computers we do loan them to the movie companies and we've been

02:26in a lot of different movies the latest of which is Severance. But just yesterday I got a call from

02:30somebody up in Massachusetts and they want to donate an Apple Lisa to us and the Apple Lisa

02:35is a very rare computer but they wanted it to go to a museum rather than to sell it. I mean

02:39those machines sell for thousands of dollars nowadays. So this is the Harrier Jet. There's

02:45another little museum and they lost their space so they have put their museum in storage. This is

02:51the Saratoga Museum and that's the ones that own the Harrier Jet. The car is a 1939 Ford and that

02:57was at Pearl Harbor. I was going to say what does it have to do with the computer museum? Well we

03:00figure we can make a nice simulator out of that if we put a Raspberry Pi in it. Make a hell of a home

03:07arcade out of it. It's amazing to think that you know you have over a thousand pounds here and it's

03:12going to be lifted straight up when the engines are turned around. Dan? Yes? Where are you?

03:22Anybody who's been watching the content for a while knows that EJ and I have adopted a little

03:26bit of a CRT obsession. My name is EJ Massa and I'm an addict. A CRT addict. Every day I go on eBay

03:34and Facebook marketplace and look for CRT televisions for me to make detailed mod videos

03:40about. And so whenever there are CRTs around I think of my friend EJ and I think what could he do

03:47with these? Just kind of walking by here we're just on the on the fringes. Look at these hotel

03:52switchboards. Very old technology. Big IBM equipment that I don't even know what it is.

03:58When we have the students come here the students can't even figure out how to dial a rotary dial

04:02because you know if you're under 15 you don't know what a rotary dial phone is. And their first

04:08question is well how do you dial 9-1-1 fast? I remember when we got 9-1-1. Before that we used

04:14to have the fire department, the police department, everything listed by our telephone. A little

04:19orange sticker right on the phone which would tell you what numbers to call. With the sheer quantity

04:24of stuff how do you decide what goes in and out of the museum? Is it the kind of thing where you're

04:28rotating things in and out? Yeah you know I haven't figured out how to say no yet. We try to to rotate

04:33our exhibits but some of the stuff is big. We had one member that there was a jukebox on the side of

04:39the road. You know I must have gone past it 10 times and I kept saying I'm not going to take

04:44that. I'm not going to take that. I'm not going to take it. So I'm sitting over in the learning lab

04:48and one of our members Mike Lill comes in and he says Dan you'll never guess what I got. A jukebox.

04:54You know a Sebring jukebox. Now this gentleman is 80 years old and he has a pickup and I asked him

05:02well how did you get that in your pickup? He says well I was standing on the side of the road looking

05:07at the jukebox scratching my head and two nice gentlemen came by and said we want some help

05:12putting that in the truck and they lifted it up and put it in the truck for him. There was no escaping

05:16that jukebox. There was no escaping that jukebox. Look at this stack of 99 4A expansion boxes. A bunch of TRS-80s.

05:22Just incredible. Boxes and boxes of TI-99 4As, Commodore 64s. They had all these Commodore 64s.

05:29You know nobody's going to want these Commodore 64s. We only need a couple at the museum and then

05:34I get a call from the show in Netflix and it's called Haunt and Catch Fire. Do you have any

05:38Commodore 64s? I said ah you know how many you know and I have 17 of them and they said all of

05:45them and that's the first scene in Haunt and Catch Fire. They have a house and they have Commodore 64s

05:50up and down the stairs and all over the house. After that I said well I better not throw anything

05:54away and so now I have you know all these Texas Instruments. I'm just waiting for somebody to say

05:59oh we have a movie about Texas Instruments. Do you ever find that you just have the box and not the

06:03and then you hang on to the box because maybe a production would like that? I've been doing that

06:07lately because I figured out well everybody wants a Gateway box you know it's got the cows on it. Some

06:12of these boxes like one of the Texas Instrument boxes is a French Texas Instrument so I kept that

06:16box. There might not be any of those left. You might have the only one. So what we have over here is

06:21we got a call from Fairfield University. It's a PDP 1135 and they said that we're getting rid of

06:26this. It was given to them by Yale. It was a little hard to transport because usually the

06:32sections come apart but in this one they're bolted together and we didn't want to take it apart so we

06:37just moved the whole thing in a van. I was a much younger man when we moved back. What year is that

06:42from? So these are the 80s and we hope to restore this one. We're going to bring this one back over

06:47to the learning lab. But I told Mike if we bring this one over we have to take something else back.

06:52That never seems to work out. The gentleman at the lab you'll meet his name is Mike. He's our PDP

06:58expert. He has many many PDPs on the wall that are working. The PDP 9 that he has is probably the only

07:04one in existence that's working. Yeah it's one of 12 in the world and it's the only one that's

07:09working. But the nice part about renting them to the movie companies is that we send them out all

07:13dirty and they come back cleaned and wrapped. They get kind of laundered through the movie company.

07:19Is that for like audio mag tape? That's audio mag tape. Yeah that's audio. This is digital. Yeah that's a

07:24computer one. Somebody had donated two nine track tape drives so people have a lot of data still on

07:30tapes and we'll convert them back to USB sticks or something. Oh wow you'll do that? This size is only

07:35about 175 megabytes of data so we can convert it. It's very easy to put it on. Right but at the time

07:42that was a ton of data. Correct. Well it's actually you had unlimited storage because you

07:47kept changing tapes. Yeah. A data file may have 20 tapes to it and it just keeps growing and growing.

07:52Yeah I remember seeing um photos of like office buildings where they just have a tape room.

07:57They just had tons of tapes hung on racks. For the same era what did the average computer store

08:02for hard drive space? Oh I mean computers of that era might not even had hard drives or

08:06you know big industrial ones would have had five or ten megabytes. So this this was mega storage?

08:10Yeah this is huge storage. This is like corporate storage and you'd work right off the tapes. The

08:14tapes were a real-time system. Yes so linear punch cards is what they are. Yeah. You know I'll always

08:20remember there's like a big documentary about when they first started the production of Lord

08:24of the Rings. Right. We're gonna go to New Zealand. We're gonna do this huge thing and

08:27they're wheeling in tons of servers and sand storage and everything and they go uh we're

08:33prepared to store one terabyte of storage for our production. We're getting avid storage. We're

08:39getting one and a half terabytes of storage set up and six avids hooked together just gearing up

08:44for the biggest thing any of us have ever seen. These two tapes in the later years taking the

08:48tapes out of these tape bands were a process. You had to take the tapes out right to use them. That

08:56was too slow. So now they use automatic which you can see a pin in the back. You just throw it in

09:02the computer and the machine would unlock it and it would stay. Do it all itself. And it would spin

09:07and the tape would come out all by itself. And it would grab it by a vacuum. So now the

09:10operators just had to just slap it on the tape drive. So one of the things that we do is that

09:15we have projects with schools and we do project-based learning. This is one of the kits.

09:20We import the kits from England. They're six thousand dollars and they're a little race car

09:25and then we host a race down in Ninnegrit Park. This is part of it. Our mission is to help inspire

09:32the workforce of the future. Electric cars will be the future. They have to learn how to put them

09:37together but they also need to learn how to program them and to do things in electronics with

09:41them. This one came from Hasbro. This is an AS400. You know I don't know what's going on with Hasbro.

09:46Hasbro says oh we would like to donate our computer to you but don't tell anybody.

09:53Except for EJ. Let's read me and you. Do you ever have to be concerned about,

09:58I mean you must, about climate control temperature control in here?

10:02Well yeah we are but we don't do anything. But there's not much you can do about it.

10:06Options are limited right? I mean a winter time's fine because cold is great. We can even turn them

10:11on in the cold. It's moisture in the summer. If we're not careful in here it builds up moisture

10:17and the floor gets damp. Try to keep stuff elevated. Yeah yeah that's why we have all the

10:21pallet racking and the shelving trying to put everything up. Some of it's a little heavy to put

10:25up. I mean the scariest things are the disc drives because you can't get any dust in them.

10:29You got to be very careful if you turn those on. Our members think that everything should be able

10:34to be turned on and you know we I don't have another thousand years so I'm not going to be

10:38able to turn everything on. But um we do get calls all the time. I got a call from somebody who wanted

10:43to save a computer and they had heard that up in Arlington Massachusetts in Boston area the Arlington

10:49Coal and Lumber Yard was throwing out their computer. It's the IBM System 3. Now you don't

10:55see many IBM System 3s around. This was at a lumber yard. They were using it for their inventory

11:00and I called them and I said well this is going in the dumpster. I said well can you wait a day

11:04and they get their forklift out and they put it on my I rented a truck up there and they put it on

11:08the truck and I'm saying oh no how am I going to get it back off the truck now you know. But we

11:12have neighbors with a forklift. This is 900 pounds. So the IBM 360 the mainframe computer most people

11:19lease it. They wouldn't even buy it because it's so expensive. And then IBM came out with other

11:23series and smaller series and this is the IBM Systems 3. This is all business technology you'd

11:28never see one of these in the home and that stuff is the stuff that really disappeared because

11:33businesses didn't care at all. It didn't go into an attic. It got thrown in a dumpster. So a

11:36mainframe computer in a business it was not unlike the idea behind a data center or a series of

11:43servers that run your business applications today. The idea was just that your primary business

11:48application like your primary record system or your primary sales system or whatever normally

11:52multiple functions would all be on one mainframe and everybody would connect to it. Really in terms

11:57of design it's not all that unlike a server cluster or a server farm but there's one.

12:03Doing just a single task like we're talking about inventory you know that's like and that was

12:08revolutionary enough for businesses that the extreme cost was justified. So what's old is new

12:13it wasn't really the cloud but you started with a mainframe computer that everybody connected into

12:19everything went to micros and standalone systems and now we're all going back to the cloud.

12:24Check this out. Personal Computing Magazine. You bet I bought a second computer. Using your computer

12:29to learn foreign languages, printer accessories, composing music on a computer. This should be the

12:35new Peter Smith motto. You bet I bought a second computer. John bought a few. You bet my room

12:42upstairs is filled floor to floor with monitors. Look at these CRTs. Sharp those are those are nice.

12:48Look at that. An old school web conferencing. 20 years of just like every corner has you know

12:54collections and amazing items here. I see a TRS business computer up there. I see you know PS2

13:00monitors way up high. All the ones that are wrapped up over here are rainbows. Deck rainbows.

13:05And those deck rainbows were in the show Pose. This is a model on RadioShack. What's interesting

13:10is this is actually the RadioShack table too so it has the real table and when RadioShack first put

13:15this out they forgot to do one thing to insulate the terminals for EMS. The monitors for EMS. So

13:21when people would take these home they take them home turn them on and everybody's television in

13:26the neighborhood would go fuzzy. So they had a big recall on these to shield them on the inside. That

13:31was one of the computers that started the home computer revolution. And here are the connectors.

13:35RadioShack had these little joysticks and everything. Look Halloween Computing from 1982.

13:40What do we have here? This little Konica. It's like a slide scanner probably. This right here

13:44that's one of my favorite monitors. It's another version of that one you were talking about EJ. The

13:48Commodore 1084. Beautiful monitor. We have a bunch of British computers because we decided that we

13:53wanted to collect British computers since we had British cars. And up above you're going to see an

13:58apricot. So you had Apple and over in England they named it apricot. And then some crazy people

14:04over in England named one after squirrels and they called it the acorn. This Commodore 1084.

14:10This one has the text control panel on it which definitely means it was part of a video editing

14:14setup using an Amiga. And they would use these monitors. These monitors were good enough to use

14:18as production preview monitors for high schools or small businesses that did that stuff. So its

14:23main benefit was that it could output NTSC video as its main video output. The IBM Data Masters.

14:28Now of course IBM had to have everything heavy so these are very heavy. Everybody named their

14:33computer. So this one's called baby and it says do not leave baby unattended. You ever encounter

14:39a Firewire 400 cable and think times are a changing. I've got a pile of those at my house.

14:47I know I haven't had the heart to throw them out completely. I've got a camera or two.

14:51Yes I still have a few. This behind you is a Sphere Univac. They were using this for their

14:56cookie inventories. Is this a green terminal? It's actually amber. Amber. I always loved the

15:01amber ones. And this is a mag card typewriter. Oh wow. And this is about one page of information.

15:07So what you would do is you type on your typewriter and you put it in the bottom body

15:11and that would copy it. You could copy it on here. Now you couldn't see it but you could reprint it.

15:16I have never seen this technology before. Yeah it's very rare. I'm not familiar with it at all.

15:20It didn't last very long. It's cut in the same way as a punch card. Interesting transitional

15:25moment in computing. If I only had a cigarette. Have you ever seen something like this before?

15:31One person sits there and the other person sits here and they look through this little screen

15:37and it's a split screen. So you're going to see half the monitor and the other person's going to

15:41see half the monitor and they're going to key punch all day. How do you think your

15:44neck would feel on that one? Right. Oh you have to like. So you need to be short like me.

15:52The space bar feels so strange. And right here is a missile guidance system from a

15:58missile silo from Canada. There's just a Lisa hanging out here. Lisa is kind of interesting

16:02because when I was 12 my computer teacher in the middle school, Westport Middle School,

16:07bought me a book about the Lisa. And ever since then I've always kind of wanted one but they're

16:12so expensive that even like over all the years I've never wanted to spend you know fifteen

16:17hundred two thousand dollars for a system. And I see it has the same Super Nintendo discoloration

16:21problem. Yes absolutely. Yeah as everything did those old plastics that aren't painted you know.

16:26A lot of computers are actually painted like all of IBM stuff was painted. This is a painted monitor.

16:31This is a compact portable computer. They call them lovable luggables. And you can pick this up.

16:36This is like 35 to 45 pounds. That's what those things are. Yeah jaunty. Bring that bring that

16:42on the plane. My job I was a civil engineer. We used to carry these around in the airports when

16:46you go to visit other projects and things. The computer companies decided that well that's that's

16:51a lot of work. We'll put wheels on it. The suitcase industry saw that and said that's a good idea. So

16:57that's why all the suitcases now have wheels on it. It's led by computers. So 1986 is the year that

17:03they were going to make Toy Story. And Pixar decided that they didn't have a computer fast

17:08enough to make the Toy Story videos. So what they were going to do is build their own computer. So

17:12this is a Pixar computer. It's actually two of them. There's a unit in the top and a unit in

17:16the bottom here. It's very similar to a Silicon Graphics. So this is the IBM 5100 and it has

17:23cartridges and so this runs the IBM OS. This is right before the PC came out. One of the things

17:28that I'm like most struck by as I walk through all the different models is how many different

17:33form factors there are for PCs. Here we have like mostly keyboard, teeny monitor, and some other

17:40bulls**t. Like over here monitor etc to the right. Personal electronic translator from Commodore. So

17:47before Apple went into the schools Commodore tried to go into schools but their computers were

17:52too expensive for people to buy at the time. What Commodore decided to do was they wanted to put

17:57their tape deck. So the tape deck is how you would get information in and out. They decided to put it

18:03into a computer and that's exactly what they did. They cut a hole in the top of it and they put it

18:08in their computer. So that's all they did. Once they put that in the top of the computer they said

18:13oh the keyboard doesn't fit. We better make it impractically small. Yeah I know. We'll put a

18:18chiclet keyboard arm from our calculators and nobody has fingers that small. You want to test it?

18:24If anybody would. So that was not a good idea and they went back to the full-size keyboard. I love

18:28it. It's one of my favorite things about early technology is trying to figure out what will work

18:32and getting it wicked wrong several times. What kind of tape are we talking? Are we talking cassette

18:37tape? Home audio. Like an audio cassette tape. Yeah your Teddy Ruxpin. And you write data to it. So if

18:42you were a student a computer student in the 70s and 80s. I was not. I wasn't a computer student. I

18:50was there but you'd have one of these. This is the Texas Instrument 990. This is the board that you

18:55would learn on. So they give this to the students and they teach them how to program with this board.

18:59It's kind of the raspberry pi of its day. Yeah. So the idea was it was like a just a standard computer

19:04board. We're gonna today we're gonna learn how to program this calculator. It wasn't a calculator.

19:08It was a mainframe computer. Okay. The calculator was just the interface to talk. It was the keyboard.

19:13That was just the keyboard. Oh got it. Got it. It's just interface. There's a little show that's on Apple

19:18TV right now. It's called Severance. This is a Ben Stiller show and he's very precise about what he

19:23wants. He didn't come himself. He said his set designers and they saw this and they said this

19:28is fantastic. This is a data general dasher terminal and we loaned him that and he said

19:34do you have five more of those? Well nobody has five more of those and he says oh can we take

19:38them apart and make five of our own? I said sure. So they took it apart and they 3D printed the face

19:45and everything of that and they put TVs in them and when you see the show those are the ones that

19:50they made to look like ours. So ours is in it too but they made five other ones and they took the

19:54keyboard and they made that and then they put a tractor ball in because they love that keyboard.

19:58That is kind of awesome. This is the system that was running in the New York City Fire Department

20:03during 9-11. It has a system A and a system B. Oh wow. Yeah but there's like an existential crisis

20:08happening here. Who are you? It says on D. What? Web surfing. Read your internet by the map. Insert one

20:14dollar. Oh it was paid to use the internet? This is a Chinese version of the Apple II. It's a clone.

20:21It's a golden II. A knockoff and that's an Apple III. The Apple III is the notorious failure for

20:26Apple. Yes. They really mispredicted what the market was about and actually went back to the

20:30Apple II and developed that line for many more years. This is Z series that's the 890. So it went

20:36the 360, 370, 390 and we'll have a 390 over at the other place you'll see that and the 890 which is

20:43the biggest one. We had a 390 but I got a call from England and I get a call from this gentleman

20:47he's a broker and he says do you want to sell your 390? No I don't want to sell it. And the next day

20:52the guy calls from England and he's from EDF which is the nuclear energy department in England.

20:59They run nine nuclear power stations with these old computers and they needed ours for parts so

21:05they said can we buy your computers? And I said all right who am I to stand in the way? I'll sell

21:10you the old computers. How much do you want? And I'm thinking I have two of these and I'm thinking

21:15well maybe 15,000 and I was thinking for both of them and he says oh okay that means 30,000 for two

21:22and I said sure. So that works. About a week later I get a call. Our accounting system won't take US

21:29dollars. Is it okay if I give you 30,000 pounds instead of US dollars? Now the exchange rate for

21:34a pound is the $1.50 per dollar so I said sure that works out for me and I get another call and

21:40he says there's no boards. Where are the boards? And he sends me a picture he shows me the back of

21:44the computer. I asked him well how old are you and he tells me his age and I said well have you

21:48looked in the front of the computers because these boards were in the front of that computer not in

21:53the back. Like this one right here I'm just amazed by the aesthetics of it. This was a machine that

21:58was meant to be seen as an incredible piece of technology. Wow. I mean this is just like

22:03industrial beauty. You never got fired for buying IBM? That was the slogan. This is the back of the

22:08machine. A machine like this could virtualize 4,000 of those machines. Why would you want the

22:14maintenance of 4,000 computers when you just buy one box? And people will say well if the box

22:20I said get another one. It's two chassis right? Figure the room you would need to house 4,000

22:27servers. But what you're describing in modern terms is ESX and virtualization. Yeah. What

22:33would happen is you could check your email on a cape in the early 2000s and it was very expensive

22:39because it was very slow. We liked it so much that we took the guts out and we put a laptop

22:44in here and we played Doom on it. That is the sign of a nerd. I remember when I first started

22:50working for my company we made printers not for this particular one but the printers that would

22:55go in these. You could browse the web page and then for an extra fee you could print out

22:59on thermal paper a copy of your MapQuest directions or your email to take with you.

23:05I thought you were going to say and we figured out a way to print out Doom.

23:14Oh let's RGB mod this. Branded TVs. That was like a thing for a little while for kids rooms and

23:20in wealthy homes. In particular EJ found one that was a Batman one. They had so many they

23:25had Hot Wheels they had like My Little Pony. So this whole wall is is beautiful to me.

23:31It started out we were throwing TVs away and then a show came to us and said oh don't throw any TVs

23:38away we want your TVs we use them in on television shows. So the show was Joy and it was about the

23:43mop lady and it starred Jennifer Lawrence. It was filmed up in Boston and that was the TV that was

23:48in it. So we built this wall of TVs. There was a show about the good nurse and they wanted a TV in

23:54the hospital room and so we actually have a hospital TV. A piece of technology that I've

23:59been fascinated by for the past few months is that very very short window of time when CRTs and I

24:04think we're looking at one that 2007 one maybe were HDMI compatible and widescreen. Well that's

24:10LCD. We were in another movie called King Kong Sky Island and they had a whole setup of a computer

24:16room and we did that. Those are iconic that's what people remember interacting with. They don't remember

24:21those machines in the server room they interacted with these terminals that are basically just made

24:25to connect. There was another show called Hidden Figures. They called us and said oh do you have a

24:29701 an IBM 701. Well nobody has an IBM 701 but we did have some books with the plans for them so we

24:35gave them the the floor plans the layout and they built their own. We loaned them our oscilloscopes

24:40here so when you see the show you see the woman moving the oscilloscope and that's our oscilloscope.

24:45These are analog computers they're really pretty patch panels. My first computer was a mainframe.

24:50What year are we talking? 69. I didn't really grow up with computers but I used them in college so

24:55I graduated high school in 1970 and went down to a school in Texas. I was in civil engineering and of

25:00course when you're in civil engineering you need to use computers back then. The first time I

25:05probably owned one was when my daughter was born. I decided to buy her a Texas Instrument TI 99 4a.

25:12Of course she was like one year old so she wasn't really going to use it but I was going to use it.

25:16The TI 99 4a was also my very first computer though mine came from a yard sale in 1992.

25:22Mine was I guess it was that that Tandy 486 that ran decimate. When you're programming on a mainframe

25:27mainframes were rented back then so time was very important so if you was a programmer you had to

25:33schedule time on the machine and they can only give it to you when the machine was down which

25:37is usually three o'clock in the morning and even when you programmed you had to write on coding

25:41sheets. Then you had to submit it to a key punch department and they got paid by the keystroke so

25:46then you get your cards back and you had to verify to see if they typed it right. Were they metering

25:51the keystrokes? Yeah so if you're a very quick typist you got paid a lot so when you would write

25:57code you would have to tell the key punch operator is this a zero or is this a an O? Is this a one or

26:03is this an L? Is this a five? Yeah so you have to put like a coding scheme at the top it's exactly

26:08what you did and then you get that back you got errors and they say sorry can't have any more

26:12time so now you're at the desk on figuring out how you fixed it. It's an RJE and as you can see it's

26:17Y2K ready so your punch cards would be Y2K ready and there's your flumpy disk. Get in there Johnny.

26:26Free cleaning job. This is a hard drives this is uh this is the drive part right this actually

26:31has the platters in it that has the platters and the heads so each one of these is 240 megabytes

26:37and so what happens is you'd need like five of them to make a gig. Yeah. And that's why the

26:41computer rooms had so many of them. You had a head crash you couldn't see it so as an operator you

26:47would load a pack on lock it up run your job and halfway through the job you get a data error on

26:52the disk pack. You wouldn't know what was wrong you would assume that the disk pack went bad so

26:57you would take the disk pack off and move it to another drive. So since the disk pack itself is

27:01now scored and scratched the heads are not flying above it so you crash that drive. You would take

27:08them off like this the pin would go in here and then just unlock you just unwind it and it would

27:15lock itself onto the drive. Eight inch floppy storage 60k so maybe you could get you know you

27:21could get a few word documents on here but they cannot have media in them. Wow that's an old

27:26tube tester. That's an old tube tester but tube technology they would burn out quite often. I

27:30think it may be 40s or 50s. What is a tube tester? It tests vacuum tubes. Yeah so everything

27:37radios and tvs used to have vacuum tubes it was like the dominant technology before transistors

27:42and if you were servicing those systems you needed a way to test those tubes so you have all your

27:46different sockets you'd set it up according to the chart that it would test it out for you tell

27:49you it was good or not. They were a replaceable commodity item you could go to any corner store

27:53and you'd have a tube section where you could buy tubes for your device. They actually would have

27:57television repairmen that would come to your house just like a doctor and they'd repair your

28:02tvs. Later on they started getting the tube testers in the drugstores and you could take

28:06the tubes out yourself if you're brave and take them to the store and test them and then get new

28:11tubes for your tvs. There's the gateway 2000. That's a big home computer from our era. We're

28:15halfway there guys. So for Ice Age Blue Sky Studios was contracted over in Connecticut and Blue Sky

28:23Studios used these little Silicon Graphic 02s and they had 14 of them and they gave us this one.

28:29Silicon Graphics is kind of forgotten about now in terms of computing but they had a line of

28:33computers that did CAD back in business in the 90s and 80s. They were very fast. Incredible graphics

28:38machines but a lot of those capabilities now have been rolled into desktop computers like everything

28:42else. Everybody named their computers and this one is named SID. System is down. A very old piece of

28:49paper right there. This was a business computer and this one cost $10,000 when it was new in 82.

28:56That was as much as two cars back then. I don't know maybe maybe just a disembodied number pad.

29:01Bunch of stereo, audio equipment, VHS tapes, Betamax. This is a Burroughs computer. The

29:07competitors to IBM that you really don't hear about anymore because IBM kind of dominated that

29:11market eventually. Oh wow Burroughs adding machine. Is this the system that later they took that CPU

29:16and made the 994A? Here's the face panel for it. I always thought that was incredibly cool that the 994A

29:23had a mainframe CPU that had just been taken down from these big boxes made into a single chip

29:29and eventually Texas Instruments didn't know what to do with them anymore and just put them in home

29:32computers because they scaled down that much at that point. Look at this again with the beautiful

29:36blue aesthetic of Data General. Look at the the space age design here. So we got a call from

29:42Harvard and Harvard said they were getting rid of their cat scan machine and we go up to Harvard

29:47and they're all out here in white bunny suits with Geiger counters. Oh you're gonna have this

29:52but you can't have that piece it's too hot. So they gave us the console. We decided not to take

29:57the laboratory table that they had that they were putting the bodies on. This is what they were

30:01taking the pictures with. It's this little screen and these are the computers. So this thing that

30:05looks like it's like a space age computer I was over here going what does it do and and he was

30:09like well it's a mini computer and for those who couldn't afford big mainframes you'd buy this and

30:14I'm thinking to myself would it have been worth it to not just do things manually and raise like

30:18if you have 2,400 employees they're all on payroll and you got to process payroll

30:21like this is. Yeah you don't want to do that by hand you need a room full of clerks. The employees

30:26are still doing whatever your business puts out but you have to. This is a room full of clerks.

30:31Yeah between microcomputers which is what we have now and we have the mini stage which is

30:35largely forgotten. Those cabinets are filled with software. Oh accounting software. Sports

30:41illustrator. Oh digital Beethoven. Oh yeah. Ocean's age. 499. To this day when I see blank floppy disks

30:48blank VHS tapes blank CDs I'm like do I need any? That's how you know when technology is ancient is

30:54when there's like Thomas Edison light bulbs on it. Those are tubes regular tubes. This is the other

30:59side of it that's where the vacuum tubes go to. Just stacks and stacks of them color-coded. Nina

31:04does this still appeal to you this sort of thing? Oh I can take that into the kitchen I can take that

31:08to the dining room. Shelves filled with IBM information that probably there's not many

31:14copies of left. This is a 1975 ECRM document scanner. So this is the very first document

31:20scanners that were made. So this would scan those documents so you know fill in the dots.

31:24Oh they got a standardized test almost. Standardized testing. Right you got to fill in the whole bubble.

31:29Yeah number two pencil demonstrating to you a properly filled in bubble versus a not. You're

31:35gonna look like a real idiot to the machine if you do this wrong. That's a heavy duty power

31:40coupler. 4 to 50. Yep incredible. That's what yes that's what would power these kind of machines.

31:45This is a very rare one. This is an Olivetti. That's a PC but you just don't see Olivetti PCs.

31:50There's very few of them made. These were mainframes. Very powerful mainframes. This was from 97. This is

31:56kind of like late mainframe era but mainframes still around today. Cray still makes mainframes

32:00for certain specialty applications so. Look at the burning on this guy. Computer days. America

32:06online for dummies. Let me ask you a question. Have you ever wanted to make your own movie on

32:12a computer? Have you ever? If we haven't been doing it for 20 years. Make highlight videotapes

32:18automatically. So this is some early AI. Oh WordPerfect of course the dollar store word

32:25processor. Hey WordPerfect was a serious business tool. So of course younger people won't know this

32:30but this is what was called a port-a-potty. The way it would work is it has no electronic

32:34components. It's got no uh really plumbing to speak of. What you do is you drop these off at

32:40an event and people can go ahead and go to the bathroom. This one doesn't flush. None of them

32:44flush. A man would come at the end of the day take away all the poop and pee and dump it off

32:50someplace else and bring it back and everybody can go to the bathroom in it. So we got one of

32:54those. But they always ask for this on movies. All right so we've seen the warehouse but this

33:01isn't the only space the Rhode Island Computer Museum has. They also have a space that they call

33:06the learning lab where people can come visit every weekend. So the curated stuff. The curated stuff.

33:11Not the stuff that you know they dump onto a shelf and say uh we'll have this just in case. Yes

33:16exactly. Let's go check it out.

HUGE Warehouse Tour, RI Computer Museum | 'Puter Smith

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