How did a secretary in a Baltimore law office compose a letter to a client in 1930? Perhaps on a Super Speed Silent typewriter by Smith and Corona. How did an accountant tally the debit column for the daily numbers in 1990? Using a Dalton Adding Machine, of course! From the ancient Antikythera Mechanism dating to the first century BC to the Altair 8800, the early personal computer that Paul Allen and Bill Gates (then a student at Harvard) wrote code for in the mid 1970s, the Computer Museum at the IT firm System Source is a marvelous chronicle of the evolution of the computer.

Through artifacts and working examples, the museum features machines like the Comptometer, the prototype for a key driven adding machine dating to the 1880s, and the Dictaphone Shaving Machine, a device that captured the human voice on a wax cylinder and stemmed from Thomas Edison’s Phonograph and Alexander Graham Bell’s Graphophone machine. The Museum even has a replica of the Enigma, the cypher machine the Germans used during WWII to encrypt messages that the British military intelligence cracked to great advantage.

Please join us and the museum’s curator Bob Roswell as we explore computers of all shapes and sizes through the ages. Who knows, maybe the museum’s Millionaire Calculating Machine from 1909 will again work its magic on our tour.