Boston, June 25, 1995
When we were in Boston last year for Dick's college reunion, we went to the Children's Museum. It shares a building with the Computer Museum on the waterfront overlooking Pier 4. Lucy was heartbroken that we couldn't tour the Computer Museum, so we went back this year.



One of the freshman "initiation" rituals at Senior House at M.I.T. was to go to Durgan Park for lunch on Saturday before registration. The waitresses were said to practice being rude to customers, and the food was good, traditional New England.

We went to Durgan Park again this trip. We had a very polite waitress, great service, and the clam chowder was delicious and authentic. My great- grandfather probably did eat at Durgan Park; he grew up in Carlisle, Mass.


The Computer Museum in Boston includes five major exhibit areas as well as a gift shop. Dick and Lucy particularly enjoyed The Networked Planet: Traveling the Information Highway™. As you enter, you pick up a slip of paper with a bar code. Your first stop is to register, where you give your particulars, and select a privacy option. As you proceed, you can monitor the locations of other visitors, and depending on their privacy options, learn more about them.


A Macintosh on the fifth floor will translate English phonetics to Egyptian hieroglyphics. Here are cartouches of Thomas' and Lucy's names. There was no 'L', so we substituted 'R' much as we do for Japanese.


When Dick was in the Computer Museum Store, he couldn't resist this core plane. On his first job in computers, he programmed a PDP8 with 4K words of core - 12 planes like the one here. It cost $1 per word. The memory on the machine used to write this page cost 1/20,000 as much per bit and the machine has 2,700 times more memory.



Sadly, the Computer Museum closed its doors in 1999. Read about how many of its resources and exhibits are being maintained and expanded.


Return to New Hampshire and New Jersey Trip.
Return to the Hodgman Family Home Page at http://www.hodgman.org/.
Last updated 2002 March 02.