Marcin WicharySome fun photos from Large Scale Systems Museum near Pittsburgh!
This magnificent Enter on both sides of this Singer/Friden minicomputer console.
DEC disk pacs (and some magnetic tapes) everywhere.
…and some very good regular switches, too.
(I liked the whole hierarchy of toggles in that last photo.)
Which one is more scary: a Mac keyboard pretending to be a Space Cadet, or a Kaypro keyboard with an extremely intense overlay?
(Mastodon rate limited me! More in a bit.)
This is a rare space-saving variant of the famous DEC keyboard that established the inverse T arrow key standard.
If you looked carefully, you might have spotted this Y2K readiness sticker on the last photo.
Not-so-fun instructions from an accounting computer that was used at a funeral home.
Why do companies tried to make circular mice happen so hard? I think this is the third one I know of (after the iMac puck one and the later NeXT one).
That’s it! I spent most of the time on the first floor with big machines. There is an entire second floor with a lot of microcomputers, but those were more familiar to me.
This is the website: https://www.mact.io/about_us
It’s currently by appointment. The volunteers were very nice!
More of the photos I took are here: https://flickr.com/photos/mwichary/albums/72177720332956990
Large Scale Systems Museum
Explore this photo album by Marcin Wichary on Flickr!
Typearture
Ben Brunzel
Hanneke
Mark Boszko@mwichary Thank you so much for posting all of those photos! What a treat.
lcamtuf 
@mwichary I have some nixie tube calculators (pic 1), but you might also enjoy the not-quite-7-segment aesthetic of Itron displays (pic 2)
@lcamtuf Ha – I reproduced that last one as TTF some years ago!
Monty Hayter 🇨🇦@mwichary My dad had an old electronic calculator — an enormous thing that must have weighed 20 kg — with a row of 10 or 12 Nixies for the display.
It was fascinating to watch in use, because it was *just* slow enough to see the digits flicker back and forth while it was calculating the answer.
Andrew Gallagher@mwichary if I had a pound for every time someone in our university computer labs grabbed one of these mice the wrong way round and momentarily thought they were having a stroke… 😂 ah good times
Colin
Charles Choi 최 민수@mwichary Here's another circular mouse for you. This one came with the AT&T 5620 terminal (I used one in grad school back in the day).
Depraz Digimouse Mouse AT&T Terminal Computer Mouse BLIT DMD 5620 630 MTG | eBay
Depraz Digimouse Mouse. The Digimouse mouse has 3 paper labels on the bottom that read The AT&T Digimouse box reads Instead of a steel ball like the older mouse's, a transluscent hard plastic ball moves freely in a larger opening in the Digimouse's retainer ring.
Deborah Preuss, pcc 🇨🇦@mwichary because "design"?
Glad we settled on: because human.
Shady Characters@mwichary Postmodernism.
BITNACHT@mwichary Why? Because they are great for some people. The ball inside is round and it feels right to grab round things. Why do most companies go out of their way to make mice look like this odd shape that is like nothing you touch in normal life?
If today’s UI wasn‘t that hostile to single-button-no-scroll-thingie I‘d be rocking the puck every single day.
Neko 
Hugo Mills@mwichary Another one for your list: I used one on a Dec MicroVax II, back in the late '80s. It had quite a large diameter, and fit reasonably well under the hand.
Eric Furst@mwichary Played a little netrek with those back in the day...
Glenn Fleishman@mwichary The same reason engineers seem to think that the uppercase O in a font should be perfectly round.
Full Metal Archaeopteryx@mwichary
Oof, that brings back memories...
Oof, that brings back memories...
Phil Wilmarth@mwichary We have gone from System-in-a-Cabinet (SiC) to System-On-a-Chip (SoC). My iMac Pro has a million times the RAM that my 1984 original Mac had. The cost was still around $2500 adjusted for inflation, so a million times more computer for roughly the same price. I visited the Living Computers Museum in Seattle before the pandemic closed it. That was really fun. The Computer History Museum in Mountain View CA is also pretty good.
echopapa
DeltaWye
penguin42@mwichary What do you mean by 'Gorton' in these ?
(As someone from Manchester I'm most used to it as being a pretty grim area of Manchester, but which once housed one of ICL computers sites); https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Computers_Limited )
(As someone from Manchester I'm most used to it as being a pretty grim area of Manchester, but which once housed one of ICL computers sites); https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Computers_Limited )
Stewart Russell@penguin42 Gorton Engraver company. Marcin noticed that it's the font on so many keycaps.
My dad worked at ICL Gorton a couple of times.
@penguin42 keycaps on the BBC micro were in Gorton
David Sudweeks@penguin42 He’s referring to the type: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorton_(typeface)
CM Harrington@mwichary you sure this isn’t a Nanoraptor special? 🤣
Jonathan E Cowperthwait@mwichary sorry for the fan mail, but, oh holy wah, I am so excited by every one of these photos; nice work; thank you; etc.!
Chaslinux
Erik Ableson
Michael Gemar
AccordionBruce
CONE OF SILENCE@mwichary so many great usernames in that list
tripleman, a 🇨🇦 in 🇩🇪"MOVE DIRT MORE THAN 25 MILES" 😬
Amin Girasol@mwichary I think @d_j_fitzgerald made reproductions of those for a recent show or conference!
petes_bread_eqn_xls@mwichary Y2K Ready lol
Briala
Hey Gus