Museum Walk

While in California for Kerry’s graduation (see prior blog post), a couple of friends from Oregon came down to visit. Together, we went to two museums, along with a tour of the Santa Cruz wineries.  The first museum we visited was the Computer History Museum in Mountain View (Wikipedia and Yelp both have more info).  If you have any semblance of nerd in you, this is a must-see stop in the San Francisco Bay Area.

It had a well done presentation of computers from ancient history through the present.  Personally (as a computer software developer for more than 40 years), I was most interested to see all the historic devices on display whose models I owned or used in their heyday.  The first keypunch I ever used when working in college was there.  As was my first SOL computer, HP calculator, ALTAIR, computerized chess board, PDP-8, Mac, etc, etc, etc…

The next day we went to the Disney museum in San Francisco.  It was also a bit of a surprise, taking much longer to go through than expected (we spent more than four hours there).  I basically grew up with Disney cartoons, and went to Disneyland as a child in the late 50’s, but really didn’t know much of the man or company other than the products that came from it.  Walt was described by almost all colleagues as “a nice guy.”  He was also a visionary who saw beyond what others could, and then convinced others to follow his path.

He had several bet-the-company projects (Snow White, Mary Poppins, Disneyland), and had several setbacks. His first successful cartoon — Oswald the Lucky Rabbit — was stolen from him, which spurred him into creating Mickey Mouse. A strike closed the company in 1941.  Almost immediately after that was settled, the start of WWII almost closed him again.  He succeeded in changing direction for the war, which almost resulted in his going out of business yet again when the war ended.  Each time he rose to the challenge and changed the direction of the company to make it stronger than before.

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