When you open the door and walk into the room, it even smells like the 1960s. It reminds you of the old garage where your grandfather kept his twin Chevrolet Corvairs. But those aren't cars you smell. Those are computers.
This is the "1401 Room" on the first floor of the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California — the room where Robert Garner and his motley crew of amateur technicians have spent the last decade reviving two of the massive IBM 1401 mainframe computers that littered the business world throughout the '60s and on into '70s.
As the door opens, you can see not only the 1401s themselves, but the mechanical punch-card machine where they take instructions from the outside world, the towering drives where they store data on spinning spools of tape, and even the desk-sized printer where they funnel information onto good old-fashioned paper. There's a gentle hum in the room. You can feel the heat coming off the machines. And, yes, you can smell them too. Garner says it's the odor of the oils used in some of the mechanical equipment, including the printer and the punch-card reader.
This assault on your senses is one of the chief reasons Garner and his cohorts have spent all these years restoring the two IBMs. They want to show a new generation what these machines were like -- and they want to show it as completely as possible. "This is the creation of a time machine," Garner says. "When people are here, experiencing this, it sparks their imagination. It transfers them back in time, but it also takes them forward in time. It makes them feel like they too can build new things."
Garner and his team also work on the IBMs because it's fun. "Though you might say that people who do this kind of thing are crazy — and you'd wouldn't be wrong — we enjoy doing it together," says Stan Paddock, another member of the group. But Garner is right: there's a larger payoff. And you feel it as soon as you step into the room.
In short, Garner and his team are historians — in the purest sense of the word. And thankfully, they're not alone.
At the Computer History Museum, volunteers have toiled to revive a wide range of artifacts from an earlier age of American computing, including the IBM 1620 and the DEC PDP-1. Across the Atlantic, in Great Britain, the Computer Conservation Society has sponsored an even longer list of restoration projects, overseeing the revival of such seminal machines as the WITCH (the world's oldest digital computer) and the Colossus (used to crack German codes during the Second World War). And then there are hobbyists like Bill Degnan, people across the globe who spend their free time rebuilding whatever old machines they can get their hands on — and occasionally flaunting their work at events like the Vintage Computer Festival.
Sadly, we can't show you what these machines smell like. Or what they sound like. Or what they feel like. But we can show you what they look like — or at least try. With the gallery of images above, we give you a few of our favorites.
Above
Behold, the 1401 Room. You can see the punch-card machine on the right, the tape drives against the wall at the back, the printer in the middle of the frame, and the 1401 itself on the left, with the blue stripe running across its top edge. This massive collection of machinery was the most popular business computer of the 1960s.
Robert Garner — a modern-day IBM researcher who has also worked for such tech giants as Xerox and Sun Microsystems — bootstrapped the restoration project in 2008 when the Computer Museum History acquired the remnants of a 1401 from an outfit in Germany. He sliped an ad into a Silicon Valley newsletter for IBM retirees, and soon, he had a team of technicians with the know-how to rebuild the thing.
A few years later, Garner was contacted by a man who who had a 1401 in his Connecticut home. This machine was built in 1961, but the man's family had used it to track expenses for the local country club through the mid-'90s. It was in slightly better shape than Garner's german 1401, so the museum bought it too.
If you're a Stanley Kubrick fan, the printer may look familiar. It's an IBM 1403, which makes a cameo in Kubrick's Cold War black comedy, Dr. Strangelove. There's a 1403 at the Air Force Base where Sterling Hayden's General Jack D. Ripper unilaterally launches a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union, and his second in command, played by Peter Sellers, doesn't realize what has happened until he finds a transistor radio tucked inside the lip of the printer.
If you visit the 1401 Room at Computer History Museum, you too will find a transistor radio — right where Sellers did.
Images: Computer History Museum
The Strange Beauty of Historic Computers Brought Back From the Dead
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The Strange Beauty of Historic Computers Brought Back From the Dead
