The hook
The world's biggest collection of old computers, including a hand-cranked Victorian calculating engine and the actual teapot that shaped all of 3D graphics.
01Why it's worth it
In Mountain View, the Computer History Museum holds the largest collection of computing artifacts anywhere: the room-filling machines, punch cards, early PCs, and a working reconstruction of Babbage's 19th-century Difference Engine that a docent cranks by hand. The relic to hunt for is the Utah Teapot, an ordinary Melitta teapot a graphics researcher measured in the 1970s to test 3D rendering, which became the single most-rendered object in computer-graphics history, the "hello world" of 3D, sitting right there in a case, faintly absurd and iconic. Even if you're not a computer person, the sweep of how fast all of this happened, and that it happened right here, lands.
02How to experience it
It's on North Shoreline Boulevard in Mountain View, paid admission, daytime hours. The Difference Engine demos and the restored PDP-1 running Spacewar! (the first video game) run on a schedule, so check times. Pair it with the Android statues a few minutes away.