The Tale of the Altair 8800 and the Giant SCSI Card

I visited the Museum of Science in Boston a couple of weeks ago. Although the Museum was under guard by a SWAT team due to heightened security for the Democratic National Convention, I was still able to visit the computer exhibits and see the world's largest Van De Graff generator throw huge electrical sparks. Here are a few photos from my adventure.



Here I am hugging a chip on a giant Adaptec SCSI card (if you're not a geek like me, all you need to know is that a SCSI card is something inside of your computer).





Wow! I saw an actual Altair 8800, the first personal computer. It had a 2 mHz processor and 256 bytes (not megabytes) of RAM.





I had to sneak past a group of SWAT team officers to get this picture with the T-Rex.