Speaking of techy and geeky, Mountain View (near San Jose) has the Computer History Museum. It’s close to the freeway, free admission and free parking (ahh, suburbia). We are computer geeks at heart (except Leilani of course), and even though it was Daddy’s idea, Mommy enjoyed it too.
The reason we visited: the Babbage Machine replica. Invented in 1837, 2nd replica built 2008 and works, polynomial sequence calculator with integrated integrated printer (not shown).
Besides the Babbage machine, they had a few displays where Leilani was bored. But then we gave her the camera and we all spent 30 minutes in the room where they just had aisles of old machines with little explanation signs. The parents got to see and learn a lot, and Leilani had a lot of subject matter for her visual exploration.
All remaining photos taken by Leilani, uncropped and unedited, but no clickable hi-res (interestingly, the scale of her pictures doesn’t require hi-res). Disclaimer: 2 of these photos are in this post because somebody else likes them (not Mommy who chose them :-)
<for geeks only>One cube of a Cray 3, 1993, theoretically 15.17 GFLOPS (I think the iMac is still measured in MFLOPS) and the whole system one big Terraflopp (only 1 system ever shipped, 0.3G$). Not full of stars, “just” a bunch of processor boards back-to-back, 16 processors per board, and I think the whole thing had to be submerged in liquid nitrogen to run.</geek>
A bench, not a computer:
A sign, not a computer screen:
The back of a display board, not a computer:
Leilani approached the boy on her own to take his picture. I told her she had to ask his Mommy first, who then thought it was cute and took pictures of Leilani.
Daddy likes this one: Leilani doesn’t just have us pose, she takes interesting candid pictures of us too.
The mandatory foot picture, this time with Leilani’s favorite floor markings :-)
