Geek Pilgrimage: Computer History Museum, Mountain View

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The Commodore PET – one of the first PCs aimed at retail shoppers – on show at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. Photo: Adam Turner

If you're visiting the home of Google in Silicon Valley it's worth taking a quick history lesson to see where it all began.

The Computer History Museum's main collection is entitled "Revolution: The First 2000 Years of Computing", taking you on a journey beginning with the abacus and slide rule, through mechanical computers and punch card tabulators to the birth of the electronic age – from the early electronic computers like ENIAC and UNIVAC to today's handheld wundergadets.

The museum is only a 20-minute walk from the central Googleplex in Mountain View, heading south along North Shoreline Blvd down to the corner of La Avenida Street. Alternatively it's a five-minute ride if you grab one of those colourful Google bicycles, which are free for travelling between campuses, and leave it in the rack outside the museum.

A replica of the punch card driven Hollerith Electric Tabulating System, designed for the 1890 US census, which was one of the starting points for IBM. Photo: Adam Turner

Be warned, the museum is closed Monday and Tuesday. It opens at 10am every other day and closes at 5pm except for Fridays when they keep the doors open late until 9pm. Entry costs US$15 for adults or US$12 seniors and students, while children under 13 are free but must be accompanied by an adult. Your ticket allows reentry for the rest of the day.

I'd allow at least two hours to look around, but for techies it's still worth the trip even if you've only got an hour to spare. As with just about any museum or tourist attraction, it's worth trying to align your visit with a guided tour. You'll want to confirm before your trip ^[1], but currently they run at 12pm and 2pm as well as 7pm on Friday. There's also a tour focused on women in computing at 2pm on first Friday of every month and the museum has plenty of love for Ada Lovelace.

The main collection "Revolution: The First 2000 Years of Computing" flows chronologically, with the 45-minute guided tour taking you through the highlights. There's a short video in the orientation theatre, but don't be afraid to skip this if you're running late for a tour, it's really just to get you in the mood and doesn't actually tell you much. Tours don't start from the theatre, they begin in main lobby between the orientation theatre and museum store.

UNIVAC 1, the first general-purpose computer for commercial use which beat the pundits to predict US President Eisenhower's 1952 landslide election win. Photo: Adam Turner

The tour moves quickly but there's a lot of ground to cover and it gives you a great overview, stopping for a few minutes at the highlights of the collection to explain why they're important to the history of computing, and sometimes the story of how they made it to the museum.

My tour was lead by one of the museum's curators Chris Garcia, who was fantastic because he really knew his stuff and his passion came through in every story he told. Chris is great but even so the tour might struggle to keep the interest of children, depending on their temperament and interest in tech.

The older you are the more you're likely to get out of the museum, because as you walk through the history of computing you reach the point where it intersects with your own timeline. For me that was the 1970s with the Apple II, the first computer I ever used as my primary school owned a handful on carts which were wheeled between the classrooms.

Two of the coolest things in the Computer History Museum: an Apollo guidance computer and museum curator/tour guide Chris Garcia. Photo: Adam Turner

For other people this point of intersection might be the Cray-1 mainframe, DEC's PDP-8 minicomputer, the Xerox Alto desktop computer or perhaps the original Palm Pilot PDA. Nearby the Apple II sits alongside the IBM PC, acknowledging the birth of the rivalry between PC and Mac which drove the personal computing revolution.

There's also a section dedicated to the birth of the internet, networking and the World Wide Web. You can see an early APRAnet switch and Google server rack, plus you can press a button to hear the screeching of a dial-up modem logging into AOL.

The museum is not all about work, once you reach the age of personal computing you'll also discover a great selection of consumer PCs, including the TRS-80, Commodore PET and ZX Spectrum. Of course you'll also find the great Commodore 64 – the first computer owned by many Australians of my forty-something vintage. I'm sure I'm not the only one who saved up their paper round money to buy one.

The Stanford Cart and SRI's Shakey the Robot, two of the world's first smart vehicles. Photo: Adam Turner

The birth of computer games also gets a look-in, with an original Pong arcade machine and a handful of early home consoles. Old-school gamers passing through San Francisco on their way to Silicon Valley should also check out the Musée Mécanique penny arcade museum at Fisherman's Wharf.

Entry is free and while the Musée Mécanique is primarily focused on pre-computing arcade attractions – think Zoltar from the movie Big – you can also pump quarters into a few classic pinball machines and arcade computer games including Asteroids, Pac-man, Space Invaders, Galaxian and Pole Position.

Back at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, you don't need to be a greybeard with a few miles on the clock to appreciate technology and history. It's not just a place for reminiscing, it's also a great place to connect with things that happened before your time.

Atari's Pong helped spark the arcade gaming revolution, with early home consoles on the right. Photo: Adam Turner

As a space nerd who's visited the Space Shuttle Endeavour ^[2] at California Science Centre and the V2 rocket combustion chambers ^[3] at Deutsches Technikmuseum Berlin, one of my highlights from the Computer History Museum was seeing the guidance system from the Apollo command and lunar modules wh ich took us to the Moon. It packs less grunt than the smartphone in your pocket, but it's also far more reliable and this amazing slice of computing history helped make mankind's greatest dream a reality.

You can also admire the early forays into robotics and autonomous vehicles, such as the Stanford Cart and SRI's Shakey the Robot which are the distant relatives of the Mars Rovers and other robots exploring our solar system. In some ways walking through the museum feels like walking through an Evolution of Man exhibit – watching technology evolve and find its feet while recognising glimpses of today's cutting edge technology in those primitive ancestors.

Much of what you see isn't behind glass, you're not permitted to touch but this closeness adds to the experience when there's nothing between you and a slice of history.

Tech for work and play: Xerox's Alto desktop computer which gave us the Graphical User Interface, alongside Texas Instruments' Speak & Spell. Photo: Adam Turner

The tour is a great chronological primer but afterwards you'll want to spend at least another 45 minutes going back through to see what you missed as well as taking a closer look at your favourites.

There are also a few standalone exhibits, such as the PDP-1 and IBM 1401 labs as well as the mechanical Babbage Engine, although unfortunately the Babbage Engine section was closed while I was there so check ahead if it's on your must-see list.

The main exhibit is quite a rabbit warren, you can't just walk through in a straight line and see everything. There are 20 areas in the exhibit and each has a few sections to explore so sometimes you'll need to double-back. The visitor map labels each area but doesn't point to individual items so you'll need to explore.

The birth of a rivalry: The Apple II pitted against the IBM PC. Photo: Adam Turner

You could spend several more hours in the museum if you really want to study some areas in greater detail, and thankfully there are plenty of descriptive information boards which tell a story, rather than just basic labels. It's not just about the hardware, you also learn about the birth of companies like Intel and IBM as well as the heroes of computing such as Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace and Seymour Cray.

There are also several informative videos. I didn't watch them all but I particularly enjoyed the one about England's Bletchley Park (also on my Geek Pilgrimage bucket list) and Colossus, the top secret super-computer used to crack enemy codes during the Second World War. Nearby you'll find one of the German Enigma machines which helped made those codes so difficult to break.

It's a lot to take in but we've come such a long way and the Computer History Museum offers a much-needed sense of perspective, as some digital hipsters tend to think of the birth of smartphones as year zero of modern technology. Every year we get excited about the Next Big Thing but it won't be long before it's also a museum exhibit as we forge the next 2000 years of computing.