The photos below are what we saw.
Kathleen poses next to a dinosaur skeleton replica on the Google campus.
The Google campus has nice amenities including
outdoor cafe areas.
Modern Art. I am sure that the Google guys
can tell you the significance of this statue.
Nice colors on the building. Google has
loaner bikes for their employees so they can efficiently get
around campus.
The campus was well done and very pleasant.
Spring has sprung in the Bay Area and the flowers
were blooming. We were out pretty early in the day so the
nighttime dew was still on the blooms.
We passed a number of nice bloom of various
species.
I love flowers, but they are pretty hard to
photograph due to depth of field issues, that is to say that not
all of the bloom is in "critical" focus at the same time. Note that in the
above photo the rear of the bloom is (generally) in good focus but the front is
not.
Smaller blooms are usually better subjects.
The fruit trees were in bloom as well.
This is one of the first interactive computer
terminals every operationally deployed. During the Cold War billions of dollars were
thrown at technology development and this station was one of the
by-products. The SAGE (Semi-automated Ground Environment)
System was designed as a command and control system to
coordinate defense against incoming Soviet bombers and
missiles. The "pistol" at the bottom center of the photo
has a CRT scan-line reader that allows the system to note the
position of the pistol on the screen, thereby allowing the
operator to select targets for scrutiny. This pistol was
an early precursor to touch screens used on all smart phones
today.
Back in the day when I was working for the Navy,
we had to test NTDS-compliant devices. This rack is part of
the NTDS backbone.
Ah, the good-old-days of the "big iron" Note
the switches to "toggle in" a bootstrapping loader.
Sad to say, but I have written plenty of code for
the S/360.
Back in the 60's and 70's, IBM totally controlled
the mainframe world and sold tons of very expensive peripherals
including things like this disk drive. Today, a hard drive
with the equivalent capacity of this device would fit in your
watch, but it would be greatly surpassed by the cheapest USB
thumbdrive from Bestbuy. Jeez, this is embarrassing, but I
also worked at a company that manufactured 9-track tape drives, a
compact replacement for the refrigerator-sized drives in the
background of the photo above.
With this device, when you suffer a "head crash"
the device ate itself due to the rotational inertia of the
spindle.
A drum storage device with one set of read/write
heads per track. The stripes on the surface
of the magnetic
material resulted
from misadjusted heads.
An older CDC mainframe. I worked on one of these while in
college.
A smaller CDC system designed by Seymour Cray
before he formed Cray Computer.
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Photos and Text Copyright Bill Caid 2018, all rights
reserved.
For your enjoyment only, not for commercial use.