

Opera celebrating today: Manchester Small-Scale Experimental Machine - r3570r3
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manchester_Small-Scale_Experimental_Machine

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unwind
I was once on a business trip to Manchester, showing off our project on the
Eurographics conference. A quick Googling gives that this must have been in
2001 (the project was Verse, a networking protocol for 3D graphics
applications).

My colleague and friend who was presenting at the conference and I had some
slack time, and being huge geeks we visited the Museum of Science and
Industry. Idly walking around, we came across the "computing history"
department, which prominently featured a replica of this machine, in (as as I
recall) 3 or 4 full-height racks.

As we stood there contemplating the enormity and general coolness of it (it
uses a freaking CRT as a kind of RAM! You can _see the bits_!), we were
approached by a gentleman who started describing it.

As we understood it, he was one of the original developers, who had also
participated in building the Museum's replica. Once he got that we were in
fact working programmers, he was visibly excited and we spent quite some time
there.

It was awesome, clearly one of my best tech museum experiences.

------
Indyan
The original tweet by @opera:
<http://twitter.com/#!/opera/status/83119985144233985>

