RI Computer Museum Learning Lab | 'Puter Smith
After visiting the Rhode Island Computer Museum warehouse, we toured their learning lab, which had an Apple LISA, an Amiga 2000, an Atari MIDI computer, and a history of storage units.
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LearningTranscript
00:00So we're in front of the Rhode Island Computer Museum in Warwick, Rhode Island.
00:03We used to come out to Warwick, Rhode Island to go to the big computer shows
00:07that used to be over at Rhode Island College over here.
00:09Yeah, when I found out that there was this Warwick Computer Museum, I was like,
00:12oh, we got to go because the ultimate junks cart, which cannot happen,
00:16would be to go back to those computer conventions.
00:18Yes.
00:18I believe those to be foundational to our relationship.
00:21The routine was go to that, buy $250 worth of normally monitors for every,
00:27always needed a monitor.
00:28And then we would hit a Boston market that is now a Chick-fil-A.
00:32And what would we eat?
00:33Macaroni and cheese.
00:34Macaroni and cheese.
00:35You know, look, right next door is a computer museum.
00:37Just down the road.
00:38We already have seen the warehouse of incredible things.
00:41Now we get to see what does it look like when it's cheery.
00:43Yeah, let's see it.
00:56These cars have two speeds, on and off.
01:05Right as we walk in, I see like a history of computers
01:08and a little video game station here.
01:10Are they mostly mini consoles?
01:12It all works.
01:12Yeah.
01:13Look, and there's the hack games.
01:16This really does have just about everything you'd want in a Genesis.
01:18It's like all the really best games of a Genesis.
01:21It comes with two wireless controllers.
01:22That's a great deal.
01:23Yeah, there you go.
01:24And then get to the S's.
01:25If you do it like anywhere above pointing it directly at the system,
01:29it stops.
01:30It stops responding.
01:31Go to Sonic 2.
01:32We all know what that sounds like.
01:39Such a piece of garbage.
01:40This is an MSX machine that's been built into an Apple II case.
01:44So MSX had a lot of games never really made it to the U.S.
01:47Is there like a game you like on MSX?
01:48Not really.
01:50I haven't really explored the catalog.
01:52Famously, Metal Gear, I think, was on.
01:53Yeah, started on there.
01:55There's a nice informational sign about how the internet came about through the Cold War.
01:58Oh, it's an acorn.
01:59That's an acorn.
02:00It's a little old.
02:01It needs some servicing.
02:03So if you hold the shift, it looks like some of the keys on the keyboard are not...
02:06No, they are.
02:07It's just I gotta get it into the right mode.
02:09There it goes.
02:10Oh, please stop tape.
02:12Please stop tape.
02:13Please stop the tape.
02:17It's a little arcade game.
02:18How does one play?
02:19How many players?
02:20Just one.
02:23Get ready, player one.
02:24Okay, oh, the spacebar jumps.
02:26Arrows up in the corner there.
02:28Oh, I pressed the break button, then everything went kapooey.
02:31The Boston Computer Society, a defunct computing organization in Boston,
02:36and I won their programming contest in 1992 and went up to Boston, Massachusetts with my mother.
02:43No way.
02:44I received an award for a program I had written for an Apple II.
02:47What did it do?
02:48Little programs to make computing easier.
02:50There was one that let you draw little pictures, file organization.
02:53They stopped existing around 98 or so.
02:56Early Intel development machines.
02:58And then this is the main room in there.
03:00Now, this is a computer.
03:01This is great, actually.
03:03That's the classic background of some Oregon Trail or Oregon Trail.
03:07You may be a banker from Boston.
03:09Yeah.
03:10I was always a banker from Boston.
03:11You got more money?
03:12EJ, Nana, Franka, Glo.
03:16Glo dies of dysentery.
03:18Yeah, me too.
03:19I'm gonna be bereft.
03:20I once worked for an executive.
03:21She had a G3, a white border G3.
03:24Computers had moved on from the G3.
03:26I think we were at like G5, and she was like,
03:29it looks really good in my office, and I don't want to upgrade it.
03:32I was like, do you use it?
03:33She's like, not really, no.
03:36It's just about the aesthetics.
03:37And this is my favorite Commodore, the 128D.
03:40I do have one of these at home.
03:41Most of the best games have been made in the past 5 to 10 years.
03:44Really?
03:45Now that people have had tons of years with the machines,
03:47they can figure out all kinds of special tweaks to make incredible things.
03:51There's a Rocky Horror Picture Show game for the Commodore.
03:54Is there?
03:54Yeah.
03:54These are all TI-99 games.
03:56I had that model right there.
03:58I didn't have a cassette drive for it, and I didn't have a disc drive,
04:01and I didn't have any games.
04:02So the only thing I could do is type in programs and hope it didn't get turned off.
04:06I love the manual.
04:07The story so far.
04:09You're a Marine, one of Earth's toughest, hardened in combat and trained for action.
04:14Three years ago, you assaulted a superior officer
04:17for ordering his soldiers to fire upon civilians.
04:20He and his body cast were shipped to Pearl Harbor
04:23while you were transferred to Mars, home of the Union Aerospace Corporation.
04:28Yeah, all games would have, like, huge stories,
04:31because you couldn't tell it in the game.
04:32Yeah, so you'd just be like,
04:34look, you're part of something huge.
04:36Oh, I love it.
04:37I haven't played it on a PC in a long time.
04:40I've played it on crappy consoles.
04:42That's all I've played it on.
04:43Nina's been playing Oregon Trail over there for a while.
04:45Am I dead yet from dysentery?
04:47This is a really cool thing, and you won't be able to represent it with video,
04:50but you put the glasses on and it's eye tracking,
04:53so you can, like, pick things up and move them in multiple dimensions.
04:57Oh yeah, these are the tracking glasses.
04:59Okay, cool.
05:00And so once you're actually sitting at it...
05:01So that's your mouse.
05:03Whoa!
05:03I'll pull it toward you.
05:04Yeah, pull it out of the screen.
05:05And rotate it.
05:08So you can take that and drop it in the crystal,
05:10and there's a camera here that you can...
05:13It's really cool.
05:14That is really cool.
05:14You can grab the camera and look inside,
05:16that'll show up on the top right screen,
05:18and you can grab the camera.
05:19Mike Thompson.
05:20I'm on the board of directors, and I fix the ancient machines.
05:23You know, real typewriters are complete mysteries to the younger people.
05:26They just don't understand.
05:28No idea.
05:29How do you change the fonts?
05:30Yeah.
05:32This is an Atari, a late Atari computer.
05:34The only computer at the time that had built-in MIDI ports.
05:36Lots had option cards where you could get it,
05:38but that made it really popular with musicians.
05:41And they've got a nice little setup here,
05:42so that you can try out MIDI on the actual Atari.
05:46They use the rock band keyboard here to get it done.
05:48This is later Atari, though.
05:50So Jack Tramiel, who ran Commodore and had great success with the Commodore machines,
05:54left after a conflict,
05:56and he went over and picked up the rest of Atari's computing business
06:00and released this line of computers, the STs.
06:05I'm making great progress.
06:06Mac SE.
06:07Isn't it funny how the OS hasn't changed all that much?
06:10You know, they really nailed it.
06:12They're like, I think we got it.
06:14It's files, it's folders.
06:15Oh, did you see the Lisa, John?
06:17A lot of them that are in the Lisa case have actually been converted to Mac XLs,
06:22so real Lisas are unusual.
06:23We were over at the Kwanzaa warehouse, and we saw one.
06:26The Lisa is kind of interesting because when I was 12,
06:29my computer teacher in the middle school, Westport Middle School,
06:32bought me a book about the Lisa.
06:34And ever since then, I've always kind of wanted one,
06:36but they're so expensive that even over all the years,
06:40I've never wanted to spend $1,500, $2,000 for a system.
06:44There's one over there that the batteries leak.
06:47It's got four giant NICADs.
06:48Everything inside of the case, including the plastic,
06:51has got green stuff all over it.
06:53That was the fate of a lot of these.
06:54Those NICADs leak down, and they ruin the backboard and on the plane, too.
06:58Well, that one, the whole inside of the case is even coated with green.
07:01Just recently, somebody has started to make replacement boards,
07:04replacement backplanes, so that you can transfer all the components over and use it.
07:08I've never been able to actually use a Lisa before.
07:11Like, I know it's based on the Mac OS.
07:13Some behavior that's almost like what you would expect, but not quite.
07:17It's not exactly fast either.
07:18Come on, let's go.
07:20It has a very slow hard drive.
07:22You ever get really young people in here?
07:24What do they think of all this?
07:25They love it.
07:26Do they, yeah.
07:26They play on all the games.
07:29Jeez.
07:30They don't care about that stuff.
07:31They don't care about the old stuff.
07:33They care about all these games.
07:34Yeah, well, fair enough.
07:35I mean, look at Nina.
07:36She's addicted.
07:39The Apple II predates me by quite a few years, but-
07:42But it was still there.
07:42It still was the lab.
07:44Yeah.
07:44It wasn't until I was in eighth grade that they got rid of all the Apple IIs,
07:47which would have been 1990, like, two and three.
07:50They had made such a huge investment in those Apples,
07:52they didn't want to do anything like throw them away, you know?
07:54There's a game called Turtle that we used to play.
07:56Oh, Logo.
07:56You'd program the Turtle to do things.
07:58That was my first introduction to programming in Westport Elementary School.
08:02It was developed specifically to teach children about programming concepts.
08:05I have cholera.
08:07No.
08:08No.
08:09Frankie, you found Mario 3.
08:11Yeah.
08:12A Hyperkin, yeah.
08:13So I see they have a Pi 5, first of all.
08:16That's what they should do, is they should have the RGB Pi on an actual CRT,
08:20and then they don't have to swap games.
08:21We were just talking about how some of the early ICs that are in some of these machines
08:25have moisture intrusion into them, and that's causing failures now.
08:29None of this stuff was designed to last forever,
08:31and it's amazing that it's still worked as long as it has.
08:33And you can get a new old stock part that's bad.
08:35Nina got pretty far, and then it said,
08:37switch disks, and she doesn't know what to do.
08:39There's a disk emulator on the side of it.
08:42That's from a hobbyist.
08:43He runs the company called Big Mess of Wires,
08:45and it is the very best Apple disk emulator for Apples and Macintoshes that exists.
08:50It has all the features.
08:51It can emulate hard drives.
08:52It can emulate floppy disks for Mac and for Apple.
08:55I might have cholera, but I'm alive.
08:57You're still alive.
08:58Ray spins it, and I push buttons, and then you can generate a little bit of energy.
09:03It gives you an idea of the mechanical resistance when you're cranking it
09:08to the amount of light you're actually making out of it.
09:10I remember one day I had to go to work with my dad,
09:13and he was fixing a boat.
09:15That was what he did.
09:15He was a hydraulic mechanic,
09:17and the captain had a PC up in the captain's area,
09:20and it played Duke Nukem, and I was like,
09:22wait, I can just go in there and play Duke Nukem all day,
09:24which was completely against the plan, and it was great.
09:27Who's shooting at me, and how do I look up and down?
09:29Oh, now EJ has a broken arm.
09:31EJ has a broken arm.
09:32With a broken arm.
09:32He's not gonna be able to film.
09:33I see you have 170 pounds of food on that wagon.
09:37What us young boys would always do is overhunt,
09:39and the wagon would just be carrying tons of bludgeoned carcasses.
09:42I haven't yet gotten to hunt.
09:44I just keep buying little amounts of food along the way.
09:46Nice.
09:46We were trying to turn it into an action game at all times.
09:48Yes, so just murder animals until we were satisfied.
09:52Oh, now you're down to 100 pounds of food.
09:53Inadequate grass, inadequate grass, inadequate grass.
09:56We're almost at the fort.
09:57Very good, but we're almost at the fort.
09:59This is one of my favorite machines, the Amiga 2000.
10:01I wonder if I can turn them on.
10:02How do you start?
10:03How do you power it on?
10:04I have no idea.
10:06You got it on?
10:07Yes.
10:07And this particular one happens to be a former video editing machine.
10:12This is the video toaster cards right here.
10:14I think they're getting ready to set up.
10:15You had four channels of video that you could switch between.
10:18It's basically a real-time video switcher.
10:20To have that in a computer that was this size in that era was unbelievable.
10:25That changed the way that video production was done.
10:27This is normal NTSC video like you could put on a television,
10:31and that is really what made these computers so adaptable into the video industry.
10:36This had stereo sound that it could play back in real time in the 80s, in the mid-80s.
10:42You can get this machine to not only run Amiga software,
10:45but because it's got a 68K processor, they made Macintosh emulation boards
10:49where you can run a Macintosh on it, and they also made PC emulation boards.
10:54So you could run a Mac, a PC, and an Amiga on a single platform.
10:58That's something I would really like to set up and get running.
11:00I think it would be just super cool to be able to
11:02just freely switch between those three environments.
11:04So this came from an old mill.
11:06This is what they used to control the looms.
11:08So this is all data storage on cards.
11:10And then we went to punch cards, which has holes in them.
11:13These were only 80 characters on a card.
11:15On the smaller systems, the IBM 34s and stuff, they used 96-column cards.
11:21In other words, used to...
11:23Store data or run a program, you could run from cards.
11:26So like the hex of a file would be...
11:28Correct.
11:28Yeah, right.
11:29We have a small manual key punch machine here.
11:32So we went from cards to all different types of storage mediums.
11:35Paper tape.
11:36You all have heard of things called core memory.
11:38This is a magnified example of core memory.
11:41And this is the memory itself.
11:42This is the size of the memory that went to the moon.
11:45That's how dense it was.
11:47And this was woven by hand.
11:48So then that was too big.
11:50So we got smaller.
11:51And denser.
11:52A lot denser.
11:53This is obviously manufactured by a machine.
11:56And then we went to smaller.
11:58So this is core memory.
11:59Same as this.
12:00And now it's starting to look more like a RAM card.
12:02Correct.
12:02Yeah.
12:03That wasn't dense enough.
12:04So we started to do chips on silicone.
12:07But it's a slice, like a slice of bologna.
12:09So this would be about six or eight feet tall.
12:11They would just slice it.
12:12They would dope components in here photographically.
12:14So they would expose this to light, which would have the chemicals on it.
12:17And then they would etch it.
12:18They would go back and forth, back and forth, building up to different layers.
12:21So they went under a microscope and they looked at it.
12:24Each one of these black squares are things that they rejected.
12:28So that's where you get the term chip.
12:30It's a chip of silicone.
12:31Today's stuff, this is a big piece of silicone.
12:34But if you look at the chips on here, they're a lot denser.
12:37This is a microprocessor on a chip.
12:38So this has got memory.
12:40It's got logic units and all kinds of things.
12:42Yeah, it's a really helpful timeline.
12:45First and foremost, we have to store data.
12:46A series of ones and zeros that have unique hexes that would define what the data is.
12:52Yes.
12:52And then we need more data.
12:53And we need more data.
12:54More data.
12:54More data.
12:55Then we talk about auxiliary storage.
12:57This is a three and a half inch floppy, which is inside.
13:00That's why they call it a floppy, because it's like this.
13:02Five and a quarter inch floppies.
13:04This is bigger than this, but this held more than this.
13:06So we had smaller, but we stored more.
13:08Then we went to hard disks.
13:10So these were made up of many platters.
13:13These were the heads that they used inside the mechanism.
13:15So these heads would expand and float on a cushion of air on these disks.
13:19The cushion of air is like a fifth of the size of a human hair.
13:22So it flew very close to the disk.
13:25And these heads, you can feel them.
13:26So very light, because they have to move very, very fast.
13:29Right.
13:30So when the disk pack gets scored, the heads would actually crash and slam down onto the disk.
13:35That's kind of an important distinction, too, is that for a long time,
13:38computers were manufactured to have a lot of mechanical components.
13:40Yes.
13:41Now they really have very few mechanical components.
13:43Well, they still operate the same way.
13:45The technology that we went from a disk pack with heads that stayed in the drive,
13:50they went to disk packs with heads in the drive.
13:52This is kind of like a proto spinning disk drive.
13:55Yes, this would spin and there's the head mechanism is right there.
13:58And then we went to drives like this.
14:00Yes.
14:01And then we went to drives like this, which are in a laptop,
14:04but you still see the same type of technology.
14:06Devices like this.
14:07This is a module and it has three tubes in there.
14:10So there's two components inside the tube.
14:12So there's basically two circuits in that tube.
14:14So a computer would have thousands of these modules.
14:17These things get warm.
14:18Right.
14:18So we went from this type of computing module to transistors.
14:23A transistor can either amplify or it can act as a switch on and off.
14:26Now inside these chips are what was in that piece of silicone I showed you.
14:30Those little tiny chips, those are logic circuits.
14:33So you need a lot of these cards to make up a computer.
14:36And as I showed you before on the other piece of silicone,
14:39you now have a computer on a chip.
14:40Take up less space, store more storage.
14:42Take up less space, store more storage.
14:44These are the early days of tape, believe it or not.
14:46Storing stuff on magnetic tape, as you saw also in the warehouse.
14:50Heavy.
14:50That's heavy.
14:51It's metal.
14:51Yeah.
14:52So the tape itself is not tape.
14:54It's metal.
14:55All this miniaturization enabled us to get to things like this.
14:59How many functions did this calculator do?
15:01Four.
15:02Multiply, divide, add, subtract.
15:03That's what this thing did.
15:04This is the first calculator made by Wang.
15:07It's an electronic calculator.
15:09He's out there by one now.
15:10This is from the early 1960s?
15:1265.
15:1365.
15:14It does your basic math operations.
15:16The Nixie tube display, if you want to do like 256 times 128.
15:22You put it in.
15:23You got it right there.
15:24But because it does its mathematics and logarithms, it's off by just a little bit.
15:28So you got to know how to round it in your head to basically to get your result.
15:32Over here, it's got a punch card reader inside.
15:35It'll actually read a key sequence off of this punch card and can run it.
15:39And very cool to see working.
15:40These Nixie tube displays and all these very old memory boards like actually operating.
15:46There's a Nixie tube right now.
15:47So back in the day when you connected to America Online, you would dial a computer,
15:52you would hear a tone, and you would rest it in here.
15:54This is called an acoustic coupler, so it's linked by sound.
15:57The way it used to work, you know, AOL used to dial up.
15:59The computer would do the dialing and everything.
16:00But before that, you would pick up the phone dial yourself,
16:04and then you'd have to wait to hear the tone,
16:06then put it on so that the rest of the process.
16:09And now the modem is connected to...
16:10Yeah, now the modem is listening in and talking.
16:12This device here would transfer digital energy to audio sounds.
16:16No, I've never seen that before.
16:17Yeah, it's the predecessor to what we had is just the dial-up modems.
16:20How's Oregon Trail going?
16:22I forgot how important rest was.
16:23EJ, Nina, and Frank are all dead.
16:26Just Glo and John?
16:27It's just Glo and John.
16:28And John has typhoid?
16:30John has typhoid.
16:31Glo got lost for a day, but now she's back.
16:33Oh, good.
16:34Continuing on the trail?
16:35All right, Nina's back there still playing Oregon Trail.
16:38Everybody's dead except for John and Glo.
16:41And he has typhoid.
16:42I have typhoid.
16:43Did you enjoy your time?
16:44Oh, yeah.
16:45I love coming to this place. It's very cool.
16:47I think that calculator is pretty incredible.
16:49I love the Atari. I love so many different things.
16:51I'm really glad you were able to get us into the warehouse, too,
16:53because that provides a tremendous amount of context
16:56for what can come in and out of here.
16:58Yeah, I really want to thank Ray.
16:59Ray has been...
17:00Absolute.
17:00He set up an awesome thing for us to be able to do this.
17:02No, no problem. It's a pleasure.
17:04Yeah, all right.
17:04Anytime.
17:05Pewter Smith.