SV Trip 2003: The Alto

[From my trip to Silicon Valley, California, in 2003]

The researchers at Xerox Parc created a workstation called the Alto which provided a foundation for their work. The computer history museum has one of the machines.

SV Trip 2003: Spacewar on the PDP-11

[From my trip to Silicon Valley, California, in 2003]

As described in Steven Levy's book Hackers, early work on video games was performed on the PDP-1 at MIT. The computer history museum has the machine. A java implementation of the game is available.

SV Trip 2003: Computer History Museum

[From my trip to Silicon Valley, California, in 2003]

The highlight of silicon valley from a historical standpoint is the Computer History Museum. They offer tours of a portion of their *large* collection.

SV Trip 2003: Computer Science at Stanford

[From my trip to Silicon Valley, California, in 2003]

The computer science department at Stanford is in the William Gates computer science building. Some of the lectures given by Stanford faculty are available online for public viewing. I am currently viewing a collection of lectures by Donald Knuth (author of the volumes on The Art of Computer Programming).

SV Trip 2003: Stanford University

[From my trip to Silicon Valley, California, in 2003]

Stanford University has had strong ties to the surrounding area for years. In more recent years, both Yahoo and Google were started by students here.