In celebration of the 30th anniversary of what might be the most-played computer game of all-time, we’re profiling Wes Cherry, the original creator of Microsoft Solitaire!

Though lesser known than his contemporaries Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, Gary Kildall was a true pioneer and champion of the possibilities of microcomputing. On what would be his 78th birthday, Engineer Josh D. reminds us of the accomplishments and contributions of this trailblazer.

One of the highlights of our Living Computers’ collection is our original Douglas Engelbart mouse prototype. In this post, Museum Guide Erin reveals 5 things you may not know about this historic artifact and its esoteric inventor.

As part of Living Computers’ celebration of Minecraft’s 11th birthday, we spoke with the Museum of Pop Culture, who happen to have built a pretty big Minecraft exhibit that opened last year.

It’s Minecraft’s 11th birthday and we’re celebrating with 11 fun facts about one of the most popular games in the world!

We spoke with our friends at the Seahawks about the unprecedented situation in the sports world and how they’re staying close to their fans at a distance.

As many of us are becoming more intimately familiar with video conferencing technology than we ever thought we would, Erin looks back at the very first video conference—as well as a seminal moment in computer history!

Living Computers' education team wanted to take a moment to send a message of support to educators during Teacher Appreciation Week. This is that message.

BASIC changed the world. In honor of BASIC’s birthday and just in time for Teacher Appreciation Week, Museum Guide James gives us 5 ways this historic programming language changed CS education forever.

Have you ever tried to recreate a beloved game yourself? “How hard can it be?” you may have asked yourself... In this piece, Museum Guide Alec details his journey attempting to recreate Solitaire using the vintage educational language, BASIC.

GiveBIG, which is celebrating 10 years of giving, is a two-day event in 2020, starting Tuesday, May 5.

In this post, Heath gives an inside look at how Living Computers’ engineers painstakingly adapt programs from one mainframe to another.

Each year in honor of Preservation Week, Living Computers hosts our annual PreserveIT! event. Archivist Amelia R. kicks things off this year with an overview of PreserveIT! 2020!

There are certain immutable truths about the human condition: love, death, taxes, and so on. In this post, Museum Guide Erin illuminates the origins of an immutable truth of the modern world: Spam email.

In celebration of Lee Felsenstein’s birthday, Museum Guide Erin M. highlights some of his major contributions to computer history.

In celebration of Earth Day, Museum Guide Erin M. discusses the right to repair and the importance of recycling electronics to reduce e-waste.

Today, one of the world’s most popular musical instruments is none other than the digital electronic computer. In this post, Museum Guide James profiles the father of digital music, Max Mathews.

In celebration of Earth Day, Museum Guide James reveals some of the strategies Living Computers engineers have used to prolong the lifetimes and lessen the environmental impacts of our historic restored machines.

The “Internet of Things” is all around us. But what is it? Museum Guide Justin walks us through these technologies that promise to revolutionize the way we interact with our homes and cities.

One of the earliest popular programming languages, COBOL has been in the news lately. Former COBOL programmer and Senior Systems Engineer Rich Alderson has his own take on this supposedly "outdated" language.

Learn about Living Computers’ own Minecraft server and join us online this weekend at http://mc.livingcomputers.org for a special Easter egg hunt!

In this two-part series, Erin tells the story of Woz—Steve Wozniak—Apple co-founder and surely one of the most iconic characters in modern computing.

44 years ago this week, the Apple 1 was released. We all know about the contributions of the “two Steves,” Woz and Jobs, but did you know Apple Computer actually had a third founder as well?

To wrap up our celebration of 45 years of Microsoft, look back at the top 15 products and services the company has developed since 1975.

In this 2-part series, Erin tells the story of Woz—Steve Wozniak—Apple co-founder and surely one of the most iconic characters in modern computing.

We have a very special Apple I in our collection -- the one that Steve Jobs himself owned.

In the mythology of Apple, there are few stories more foundational than that of Steve Jobs’ visit to Xerox PARC in 1979. In this article, we attempt to puncture the mystery of what really happened in this seminal episode in computer history.

Get to know some of the most influential people within Microsoft through our new Q&A series. Here we feature

Get to know some of the most influential people within Microsoft through our new Q&A series.

We take a long look at one of the most influential artifacts in Microsoft's history: the Altair 8800.

Get to know some of the most influential people within Microsoft through our new Q&A series, starting with Chris Charla, Senior Director, ID Productions at Microsoft.

In celebration of Microsoft’s 45th anniversary, Living Computers is spotlighting Microsoft employees who have made an out-sized impact both in the world of computing and in their communities.

Living Computers: Museum + Labs has over 50,000 artifacts in our collection, and some of them are really odd! In this series we will be showing off some of the oddest!

In this Enhanced Artifact Spotlight, we showcase the old-fashioned-looking machine without which Microsoft might never have even existed!

In the first part of our new series, Fun with Vintage Computers, we show you how to play the very first game ever published by Microsoft: Adventure!

In celebration of Microsoft’s 45th anniversary, Living Computers is spotlighting Microsoft employees who have made an out-sized impact both in the world of computing and in their communities.

In celebration of Microsoft’s 45th anniversary, Living Computers is spotlighting Microsoft employees who have made an out-sized impact both in the world of computing and in their communities.

This is final portion in a four-part series from Living Computers' Curator Aaron Alcorn that reflects on the 45th Anniversary of Microsoft.

In our latest Enhanced Artifact Spotlight, we look at the happiest little trees you can create with the one and only MS Paint.

Find out the origin story behind one of Microsoft's most successful games of all time.

This is part three in a four-part series from Living Computers' Curator Aaron Alcorn that reflects on the 45th Anniversary of Microsoft.

In this latest blog entry, Senior Systems Engineer Rich Alderson dissects the development tools created by Paul Allen that enabled he and Bill Gates to create Microsoft's first product: Altair BASIC.

This is part two in a four-part series from Living Computers' Curator Aaron Alcorn that reflects on the 45th Anniversary of Microsoft.

45 years of computing and technology innovation has made Microsoft one of the biggest companies in the world. Our online celebration will explain why through the lens of the countless artifacts and stories we have in the museum. This is the first part of that story.

Ever wondered the story behind a certain artifact? Who was responsible for a particular piece of software? Well Living Computers' Did You Know feature will answer your questions and more! First up, a look at classic arcade game Computer Space.

Continuing our series on our Engineering Team's first forays into computing, Senior Systems Engineer Rich Alderson details his first computer.

In this new blog series we are peeling back the curtain to show off some of the exciting tour content we are developing at Living Computers Museum + Labs. Each week we will preview a new program featuring the historic artifacts in our collection. This week we will be taking a look at 3 historic versions of the classic educational game The Oregon Trail.

Our Engineering Team looks back at some of the first systems they used and the impact it had on their life in computers. Up first is Senior Vintage Software Developer Josh Dersch.

Ahead of Will Mari's Tech Talk at Living Computers: Museum + Labs, read our Curator's thoughts on his book, A Short History of Disruptive Journalism Technologies.

We’ve wanted to get TSS/8 running at the museum for a long time. The biggest impediment to running TSS/8 on real hardware in this year of 2019 is the requirement for a fixed-head disk. There are not many RF08s or RF32s left in the world these days, and the ones that remain are difficult to keep operational in the long term.

In February 2016, a wonderful piece of news came to the attention of the international vintage computing community: The source of the original implementation of the Unix operating system, written for the DEC PDP-7 computer, had come to light, in the form of listings for the kernel and several user programs (including the editor and the assembler program). The announcement came from Warren Toomey, founder of The Unix Historical Society (TUHS) in Australia.

In early July of 2019, the power supply of one of our rarest and iconic machines, started to fail. This is the IMLAC PDS-1 originally produced from 1970 to 1972. Despite the efforts of our staff to troubleshoot and replace components, we were soon left with a completely failed power supply.

Hear from LCM+L engineers about the story behind the UNIX v0 restoration project.

We often use RS232 serial communication in our projects. The USB converters are very convenient.

Xilinx FPGA chips have limited memory available.

We are using an Apple ][ keyboard to control our Apple original.

That is the question that one of the blowers in the base of KATIA, our 1967 PDP10-KA was apparently asking itself a couple of weeks ago.

Two 55-pin connectors are available on the PDP-7 SN129. One provides 18 bits of output data, and the other can read 18 bits of input data.

Back in October 2018, our PDP10-KI went down, and it didn’t want to come back up. I ran all the normal diagnostics, and they all worked, but the TOPS-10 would hang when I tried to boot it. That is the definition of Computer Maintenance Hell, Everything works, but the operating system won’t run!

The PDP10-KI went down sometime in the fall, maybe October. This is the machine just to the right of the CDC6500 as you come in the second floor computer room. I noticed this fairly quickly and tried to reboot it, but it would hang when I tried, several times.

Back in January I unleashed my latest emulation project Darkstar upon the world. At that time I knew it still had a few areas that needed more refinement, and a few areas that were very rough around the edges. The Star’s Ethernet controller fell into that latter category: No detailed documentation for the Ethernet controller has been unearthed, so my emulated version of it was based on a reading of the schematics and diagnostic microcode listings, along with a bit of guesswork.

Back in September 2018, we got a new addition to the LCM+L computer collection, but we didn’t talk about it. This was something that we had been looking for for 10 years or more.

In the process of restoring the Bendix G-15, we have discovered a phenomena that degrades the electrical connections which provide bias and signal flow, rendering the computer non-functional.

We received our first ALTO in running condition and after evaluation and testing, put in on the exhibit floor available to the public. One afternoon about a year later, the machine suddenly froze and stopped functioning. It was taken off the floor and evaluated in one of our labs. When it became clear that power supply current was not flowing into random parts of the backplane, the focus shifted to the power supply rails. It was there we were confronted with this phenomena.

In 1981, Xerox released the Xerox 8010 Information System (codenamed “Dandelion” during development) and commonly referred to as the Star. The Star took what Xerox learned from the research and experimentation done with the Alto at Xerox PARC and attempted to build a commercial product from it. 

In my last blog on the CDC, we were having a slow refrigerant leak in Bay 1, and we were waiting for parts. The new parts came, but they were wrong, then they came again, and they were wrong again. Eventually the right parts were delivered, so we took the CDC down yesterday morning to work on the cooling system.

Early in the restoration and troubleshooting of the Bendix G-15 it was noted that tube filament failures occur with some regularity. It is not possible to observe working filaments on all the tube modules, as at least half the tubes have what is call a “getter coating” at the top of the tube, obscuring the filaments.

In the process of troubleshooting our earliest machines, we had to replace large components called electrolytic capacitors. These are located in all the power supplies for any computer. We successfully replaced these devices and got the machines running. Recently though, we have started to see these devices fail once more. They have a finite life of a maximum of 14 years.

The CDC 6500 has led a rough life over the last 6 months or so: way back on the afternoon of July 2, 2018, I got an email from the CDC’s Power Control PLC telling me that it had to turn off the computer because the cooling water was too hot! A technician came out and found that the chiller was low on refrigerant. He brought it back up to the proper level, and went away. Next morning it was down again. ...

As anyone familiar with LCM+L knows, the museum initially grew out of Paul Allen’s personal collection of vintage computers. Many of the larger systems in the collection reflected his own experiences with computers beginning in when he was still in high school. Among the systems he used then were System/360 ...

My last article explained that the DEC 340 Monitor pointed at and shot dots from an electron gun to light up spots on its screen. That was my magic chant, the method of how the DEC 340 drew its pictures as a collection of dots. Every picture a DEC 340 ever showed was made of dots flashed onto its radar tube ...

Previously I introduced my DEC 340 monitor restoration project. I promised then to describe how the DEC 340 monitor worked. I will, but that explanation won’t mean much without some context first. After the context the special magic that makes the DEC 340 different from other computer monitors will be revealed. High ...

My big project this year is to get a DEC 340 monitor working. Here is a picture of one of them. The DEC 340 was a very early and rare computer monitor dating from the mid 60’s used of course, on DEC computers, their PDP series. Two cabinets of rack mounted electronics. The 340 is historic and was used ...

I have 4500 modules in the CDC 6500, and it isn’t always easy to debug them in the machine, because convincing the machine to wiggle its lines so I can check each transistor on a particular module is difficult. In order to make this problem a little easier, I have built a cordwood module tester. It has taken a ...

Minecraft is getting a little stale for me now. I’ve done my exploring, and exploiting. Nothing left but… to look at the database! Each Minecraft world has its own folder in the save directory, with other subfolders and a lot of data files. I noticed that each map created in the world is a separate file, and that file is in GZip format ...

The IBM360/30 gets stuck in a microcode loop. The documentation indicates that a branch should be taken if the Z-bus is zero, and the branch should be taken. The branch is not being taken. A previous annoyance was that the microcode would stop at address 0xB46. As the documentation indicates for that location, ...

Five years ago, when we were getting done with restoring our PDP10-KI, we were running out of working disk drives to run it from. We were down to one set of replacement heads, two working drives, and we didn’t have a source for new ones. We found some folks that said they could rebuild the packs, but it turned out ...

When we last left our hero, he had re-soldered all the Via rivets on one of the 510 “PS”, core memory sense amplifier modules in the CDC6500, and the machine was working. That lasted about a day, and the memory went away again. What was wrong this time? You guessed it, bit 56 in bank 36 was bad again. Third time ...

The IBM360-30 uses Printed Card Capacitor storage for microcode. The cards were created by printing Silver ink on Mylar, or etched copper. 304 cards make up the microcode. I scanned them all. My procedure was to remove one card, clean it, scan it, and then replace it before removing the next card. My original ...