The Microsoft Museum, a place that used to exist in Building 27 on our campus, was for all intents and purposes moved over to the Microsoft Visitor Center in the new Building 92.
Carried over were several interesting artifacts from the history of Microsoft and from the golden age of computers that I was able to take photos of using my HTC Touch Pro 2 camera phone. Here’s just a quick sample of some of the things on display:
“The MITS Altair Personal Computer”
This was the fabled computer that Bill Gates & Paul Allen created BASIC for. A kit computer that was produced and manufactured out of Albuquerque, NM, The Altair was a monstrosity that brought out the true geek in everyone at the time, giving rise to computer clubs and software companies like “MicroSoft”.
I recall Paul Allen & Bill Gates recounting the day that Paul had flown to Albuquerque to demonstrate their version of BASIC which had to be hand entered into the Altair slowly and painstakingly using switches. Paul was on the phone will Bill during it’s first run through and Bill asked him, “What’s going on?” and Paul responded, “It’s doing something!” An it started to do arithmetic.
Yup. In case you missed that, their BASIC ran and executed perfectly on it’s first run through. Awesome.
“Technology from the past”
Here some other classics that you can find on display at the Microsoft Visitors Center:
There’s actually quite a bit on display but these are the items that I couldn’t help but take a photo of for posterity. It’s interesting how the center is designed to take you past the historical areas before you hit the areas focusing on Windows “today” sections, Xbox, Windows Phone, Bing, Surface, etc.
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