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Computer History Museum in San Jose

Are there two CHMs now? I thought the CHM was in Mountain View.

Back when, people would have said "near San Francisco", but then there was that stupid Dionne Warwick song... :) I liked the Jeanette Macdonald song better...
 
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Pretty sure it's the same CHM. If you're not from around there the cities have kinda grown into each other so it's hard to know what proper city you're in. It's certainly well organized, the shelves I thought were a bit interesting in their simplicity but then again what else would anyone find to stack computers on and let them all be visible.

The impressive bit of course are the old huge servers for those of us who hadn't seen computers from that era. I love the cigar ash tray that's built into one of the control panels (for military generals, etc who would be pacing back and forth with their cigar while they look at the radar).
 
Chuck(G) said:
Are there two CHMs now? I thought the CHM was in Mountain View.
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As far as I know there is only one, and Mountain View is right next to San Jose so it is hard to know exactly which town you are in. But the museum's address is Mountain View right off of the 101 freeway.
 
There are these things called Sunnyvale and Santa Clara in the way. Not next-door at all.

I wasn't aware that Mountain View contacts San Jose at any point in its periphery. There used to be (and for all I know still is) a bit of snobbery from the peninsula cities (Los Altos, Palo Alto, Mountain View, Redwood City, etc.) toward the stuff at the bottom of the bay (Milpitas, San Jose, Campbell).

CHM is pretty close to NASA Ames (think about where ILLIAC IV finally died).

A few decades ago, wasn't there an outfit that developed roller coasters in approximately the same area?
 
Chuck(G) said:
There are these things called Sunnyvale and Santa Clara in the way. Not next-door at all.
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Right, sorry its just in my mind they are very close, and they are but as you said they are separated. When you have spent the last five years driving for a living (45k+ mi per year) San Jose to Mountain View seems very very close.
 
If you're driving from Martinez to San Jose every day, you have my sympathy! Maybe not as bad as some folks driving in from Tracy or Modesto, but it's still a hasty haul.
 
Well the last job had me driving all over Cali and NV. But I just got done with a temp summer job working in Menlo Park. It is quite a haul getting down there.

I am looking for permanent employment down there (and in SF) though, but will most likely move closer. At least I'll be closer to the computer museum...
 
Yeah for us outsiders driving past Sunnyvale it just looks like a neighborhood (all I saw was a wall with Sunnyvale on the side of it) but since there isn't any (that I noticed) open farm land between the two it doesn't appear like you ever leave one city. So yes you're right Chuck just for those visiting and hopping on the highway for 20 miles it feels like one city and doesn't really stand out much. I flew into San Jose for the VCF years back and I have no clue what cities I was truly in still.

I'm sure there are lots of places like that (Pittsburgh I know has all these townships which used to be different towns), Dallas I could walk a few blocks and be in a different "city" or county for whatever reason and all of a sudden no beer in the convenience stores. It was quite confusing.
 
To be fair, on the peninsula, the body of most cities lies west of 101, which really hugs the bay pretty closely. It's also true that most of the cities have become homogenized over the years. When I moved to Sunnyvale over 40 years ago, Sunnyvale was noted for cherries and canneries--in the springtime, pink cherry blossoms used to pile up in the street gutters, while P3 Orion sub-chasers flew overhead from Moffett Field. Santa Clara (and Campbell) was noted for its Italian prunes; Mountain View for its apartment buildings. North First Street in San Jose was a little two-lane road that garbage trucks took to dump their loads in Alviso (now part of San Jose). Santa Clara valley parking lots are said to be on top of some of the most fertile land in the US.

Twenty years or so ago, I left. What was a pretty laid-back and friendly community had turned into a congestedtraffic-choked rat race that held no appeal to me.

Progress, I guess, if you want to call it that.
 
Chuck(G) said:
I wasn't aware that Mountain View contacts San Jose at any point in its periphery. There used to be (and for all I know still is) a bit of snobbery from the peninsula cities (Los Altos, Palo Alto, Mountain View, Redwood City, etc.) toward the stuff at the bottom of the bay (Milpitas, San Jose, Campbell).
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Oh, the snobbery is still there, although there's some exceptions to the "peninsula is better" rule. There's a large gray area between Menlo Park and San Francisco, including San Mateo, Redwood City, etc. that have earned a reputation for being dumps, at least the parts of them within sight of 101. *East* Palo Alto is the poster boy, of course.

The "love the smell of their own byproducts" crowd actually infests the Bay Area all the way south to places like Saratoga and Los Gatos, and San Jose proper has pockets of it. (For instance, the westernmost piece of it that separates Cupertino from Saratoga.) If you wanted to describe what the real-estate people often call the "RBA" ("Real Bay Area", IE, the magical places where a fifty year old dump on a 6000 thousand square foot lot sells for at *least* a million dollars, real estate bust be damned) you'd have to come up with a formula that takes into account factors like: distance from 101; altitude; proximity to PARC, Stanford, Google, or (name your favorite famous Silicon Valley Icon's) garage; the white-bread-edness/Xenophobia of the population (Higher is better. Asians might be okay if they're the *right* Asians.); the level of latent insanity/self-obsession/political schizophrenia (again, higher is better)... it's very complicated since a high score in one area can counterbalance a low score in another, and sometimes the "ritziest" places are literally right across the street from a war zone. (See "Palo Alto" again.)

Frankly, ignoring it all and calling the whole wad of lunacy either "San Jose" if you're in the south or "San Francisco" if you're in the north is probably a healthy defense mechanism.
 
Heh, I can remember when folks bought homes in Saratoga and Los Gatos because they couldn't afford homes in Santa Clara. Los Altos Hills used to be a sort of hippie community with lots of funky cottages on unpaved roads (there are probably still a few very modest 50s-era houses left, but not many. Palo Alto had its share of crackerbox homes, particularly those Eichlers (the FD used to called them "30 second" or "1 minute" houses, referring to how long they'd take to burn to the ground.
 
Heh. As insane as it is Eichlers (in places like Palo Alto) are actually positioned on the market as if they were amazing pieces of Modernist architecture and priced at a premium compared to similar vintage-yet-slightly-less-awful houses.

(Okay, I'll admit that a well preserved/restored one can have a "certain something" when it comes to style, but that doesn't change the fact that they're a few sticks stuck into a concrete slab and roofed over with ticky-tacky and tarpaper.)

As you mention, places like Los Gatos and Saratoga are particularly sad because they're basically hillbilly/"white flight" suburbs that have taken on airs. The councils of those towns are incredible when it comes to using the pretense of "maintaining their charming rural character" as a bludgeon to crush anyone who dares try to, for instance, build affordable housing within their city limits. Protectionism/fear of change is a defining characteristic of the RBA, actually. The Saratoga city council went into full-bore freakout mode recently to prevent a cell phone company from building a badly-needed tower *on their own property*. And don't get me started about the moronic objections the peninsula people have been coming up with to object to any improvements being made to the rail corridor that runs through their precious little enclaves. (And which in its current configuration provides a convenient and affordable suicide option for their stressed-out forced-to-overachieve teenage children.)

Hrm. I guess it shows I'm a little cynical about the "RBA" concept. Whee.
 
Finally got to visit the CHM today - my folks (whom I'm visiting) live up near Sacramento, but we made a day trip down to the Bay area. Absolutely amazing place; we only had a couple hours to spend, but I honestly could've spent the entire day just meandering through the museum and reading all the information. I was a bit disappointed that the PDP-1 wasn't being demonstrated, but just getting to see it up close was amazing (and the Galaxy Game machines were nearly as cool for Spacewar! purposes.) On the bright side, we were just in time for the Difference Engine demonstration, which was rather mesmerizing.

Erik, were you around? You look familiar in your photo with Woz, I think I spotted you. I only recall that we talked to a couple of staff manning the IBM RAMAC hard drive, though - can't put any faces with the conversation.
 
I work in Los Altos, and it's a very weird town. You'll see shabby ranch homes with a rusty pickup on cinder blocks sandwiched by gaudy McMansions.
 
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