satiated_grue's comments

There was also the 8089 I/O co-processor designed for the 8086/8088 that I have never seen.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_8089

ASCII was started in 1960. A terminal then would have been a mostly-mechanical teletype (keyboard and printer, possibly with paper tape reader/punch), without much by way of "circuit logic". Think of it more as a bit caused a physical shift of a linkage to do something like hit the upper or lower part of a hammer, or a separate set of hammers for the same remaining bits.

Look at the Teletype ASR-33, introduced in 1963.

I certainly remember magnetic media being referred to as "disc".

For one quickly Googled example, the Sperry Univac 8433, may its heads never crash:

https://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/univac/1100/brochure...

FL180 is the floor of Class A airspace, "the flight levels", where airliners etc. operate.

Relevant chapter from FAA "Pilot's Handbook of Aeronautical Knowledge": https://www.faa.gov/sites/faa.gov/files/17_phak_ch15.pdf

In the "Flight Levels", altitudes are referred to not in feet above sea level but as "FLxxx" where xxx is a nominal altitude in 100s of feet.

Altimetry is done using barometric pressure. Since this varies with weather, airplanes at lower altitudes set their altimeters to the local barometric pressure for a reasonably accurate reading. In the flight levels, where planes are typically covering ground quickly and there is very little chance of your path conflicting with the surface of the Earth, every plane sets to an agreed-upon reference of 29.92 inches of mercury as the altimeter setting.

In a world where Burroughs/Unisys MCP still exists, I have to believe there is still production code written in Algol.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burroughs_MCP

This seems to be a bit of an echo of the 1980s and the power shift brought about by the introduction of the IBM PC - the decentralization of control over data and processes from the walled garden of the computer room to the people at their desks with VisiCalc and BASIC, and then the explosion of productivity software.

There's solid representation of Boston and DEC in particular, for example, as well as IBM, so not all /that/ "Silicon-Valley-legacy-centric".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Computer_Museum,_Boston#Co...

There are a great many modern modifications available for the 8-bit Ataris, many of them from Poland where the machines saw good sales quite late compared to the US.

Using modern electronics (FPGAs etc.), processors, and high-density memories, you can imagine the processing, graphics, and I/O improvements that can be made for relatively low cost.

Many hobbyist machines at this point are highly modified, with much new software taking advantage of the new features, so specifying "classic unmodified" pretty much means a system into which you could have slapped a ROM cartridge purchased at your local computer store back in the day. XL/XE sounds like it rules out the original 800 and 400 models.

Here's some context on the RCA 1802 (COSMAC) Membership Card, also by Lee Hart at the same website, which is the real star of the lineup:

http://www.retrotechnology.com/memship/memship.html

The Udvar Hazy is being expanded to hold more stuff.

The downtown location has more interpretation of artifacts - sometimes at the Udvar Hazy it's hard to really appreciate what you're looking at without a docent-led tour or other context.

It also doesn't hurt that the docents include people like an SR-71 pilot.

The Henry Ford has tons of cool stuff. A running Apple 1. The working Wright Experience replica of the Wright Flyer that was flown at Kitty Hawk for the 100th anniversary. So much amazing

They have not only the actual Wright Brothers Cycle Shop building and their house from 7 Hawthorn St. Dayton (Ford moved the buildings), but Ford hired their mechanic Charlie Taylor to set everything up as it was in Dayton. Taylor re-acquired the original tools; not the same kind, the exact serial numbers. When you walk outside, there's even a Dayton manhole cover on the ground.

If you can, combine the NSA visit with a visit to the System Source Museum: https://museum.syssrc.com/

A great museum in its own right, and some overlapping with the NSA Museum (e.g. Crays, TEMPEST Macintoshes).

A fun telling of the story of that boat by the Fat Electrician.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4s-ZY0lnGeI

Remember the trademark fights between Apple Music (Beatles) and Apple Computer? Interesting history.

A fascinating learning machine without a computer.

Take a look at floppy disk controllers like the AppleSauce, Greaseweazle, and Kryoflux for preserving floppies by recording at the flux-transition level.

lilo

Why did the programmer set up his Christmas tree on Halloween?

Because OCT 31 == DEC 25

The Apple II had a non-linear layout of video memory, so programmer Jordan Mechner used a layer of indirection where he had an array of pointers to rows of screen memory.

They realized that inverting the screen was as simple as inverting the row-pointer array. Then they managed to convince Broderbund to ship a double-sided floppy with that change in the software.

There were a series of graphics adapters that started with the IBM PC:

MDA = Monochrome Display Adapter (text only) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Monochrome_Display_Adapter

CGA = Color Graphics Adapter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_Graphics_Adapter

EGA = Enhanced Graphics Adapter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_Graphics_Adapter

VGA = Video Graphics Array https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Graphics_Array

With some others like the Hercules which was MDA upward-compatible and did graphics as well as text.

They didn't really do any graphics "processing"; just displaying memory-mapped pixels in various formats.

They were memory-mapped, and the MDA used a different memory block than the CGA/EGA/VGA, so you could have two separate monitors simultaneously, doing things lke running something like Turbo Debugger on the MDA text display.