The annual Computer History Museum Volunteer Appreciation Day was this past Sunday. As usual, a good BBQ lunch was served. The museum staff gave us an update on the plans for the next two phases of development, including the Timeline of Computer History which will be the main exhibit area, a raffle for door prizes, and a Jeopardy-style quiz game.In the quiz game, each person was only elgigle to win one prize. The prize levels were keychain, mug, and baseball cap, with a fourth level in the “machines” category for “mystery artifact”. I didn’t especially want a keychain or mug, so I only tried to answer the baseball cap questions. In the machine category, there was a question about the US name of the Japanese “Super Famicon”. I answered that it was the Nintendo Entertainment System, or NES, which was wrong because it was the Super NES. D’oh! I should have known that, although I’m not really an expert on home game systems.
For the mystery artifact, the format was a little different than in previous years. They did not actually show us the artifact. The last two times they did that, there were people in the audience that immediately had the answer, though I got a lot of laughs when the artifact was a shoe and I said that it was the first shoe used for SneakerNet. (Actually it was the first shoe designed using a CAD system.)
This year, first they gave a verbal clue, which was something about the machine having core memory and serving multiple users. I immediately suspected that it was either a Wang calculator or a DEC PDP-6 computer, but I wasn’t sure enough to guess. No one had a correct answer based on just that clue, so they showed a photo of a backplane. It clearly was not a DEC or IBM backplane, so I still thought it was a Wang, but I didn’t answer yet. Then they said that it was made in Massachussets, and then they showed a photo of a front panel. The front panel had a “Prime” legend on one of the switches or indicators, so Gordon Bell guessed that it was a Prime computer. Finally I raised my hand and guessed that it was a Wang calculator. That was correct, but not specific enough; a model number was required. I guessed 2200, which was the only Wang model number I could think of, but was incorrect. Since no one else came up with a more specific answer, they decided to award me the prize, which was a $75 gift certificate to The Cantankerous Fish in Mountain View. The artifact actually was a Wang 320SE calculator. The Wang 2200 was a later desktop computer that ran BASIC; I used one in high school.