Old Computers and Hardware @ Museum of Technology, Finland
Friday, January 10. 2025
For a couple months, there is an exhibition of "operators and automated data processing designers" in Museum of Technology.
I visited the exhibit as tons of old hardware was shipped from Computer Museum of Finland, Jyväskylä. As there were so many interesting pieces of hardware, I'm presenting a few pictures here. On any typical blog post, I'd blanket my text with links. Here, on purpose, I'm omitting them. "Do your own research" as conspiracy lunatics say!
Funet Cisco AGS+
Back in the day, in 1988, when you visited ftp.funet.fi, your traffic when through this exact router. It was the first ever router manufactured by Cisco Systems.
Psion Revo
I owned one. It was a magnificant piece of pocket-size computing power! As a minus, any kind of transfer required the thing to be plugged into a PC. This minor drawback didn't slow me. Neither did the black&white screen.
Later Nokia purchased Epoc and made it Symbian.
Nokia Communicator 9210
While this wasn't the first ever communicator by Nokia, it was the best one. Proper screen, good keyboard, Symbian 5, ah.
Back-in-the-days, I was poached to a company to write Symbian C++ code for this device. Fun times!
IBM PC
As in - the first one. Ever! From 1981.
For this invention everybody on this globe owes a lot. If IBM had kept the system closed, there wouldn't be no ecosystem for hardware manufacturers nor software crafters. This ecosystem made all the next rounds of evolution possible landing us where we are today.
Ancient: IBM 3380 HDD
Moving to antics. Back in 60s this refridgerator-sized thing was one of the early HDDs invented by IBM. Capacity was 2,5 gigabytes. During that era RAM was in kilobytes, floppy disks barely reached megabyte.
Ancient: PDP-11
This DEC thing pre-dates me. Those things from 60s were so rare, I'm sure not many ever landed shores of Finland. The screen size is something from 2020s. However, the display is 1m x 1m x 1m and has to weigh a ton!
Ancient: DEC VT102 Terminal for the PDP-11
When you open a "terminal" in OS of your choice, it's a software version of that. Funny thing is, VT102 is still a common terminal type to emulate.
Ancient: IBM System/360 Control Panel
Your Windows 7 had a Control Panel. This is the same thing, but for IBM S/360. That's how you'd manage your computer's settings back in the 60s.
