Museum of Science and Industry (was: Interesting places in Chicago area?)

At 05:07 PM 3/12/02 -0600, you wrote: It was quite influential in my life path. Who knows, maybe I would have turned out the same, but besides all the cool off-topic stuff displayed there, two of the exhibits I still recall and are more on topic as they relate to computers. One exhibit was a little display about the size of a podium. It had an exposed PC board on top with heavy gauge copper in an odd pattern. A metal "pen" was used to draw a digit from 0 to 9, and based on which traces you touched and the sequence you touched them in, it would display what digit you had written. On the front was the schematic of the thing, containing many dozens of transistors. Was it the first palm pilot? This was probably around 1974 or so. The other display I recall vividly was the tic-tac-toe machine implemented as a clacking relay computer. You could see the relays activating behind the plexiglass. In 8th grade when I understood just the basics of digital logic I attempted to design my own tic-tac-toe computer using transistor/diode/resistor logic. I didn't understand how "state" worked, so I had a massive tangle of combinational logic. I probably would have had to feed 100V in to the inputs to get a measurable output after so many diode drops. In high school, I had access to a Wang 2200 computer, and after a few warm up programs, I wrote a BASIC program to play tic tac toe. My first implementation was along the lines of the combinational logic -- just a lot of straight "if this and this and this then do that" statements. I visited there about five years ago and it didn't hold the same appeal. I don't know if it was just that I had matured and the wonder of the world has been lost, or if the displays just have a different flavor now that doesn't appeal to me. Ah, memories. ----- Jim Battle == frustum(a)pacbell.net