Bill Atkinson: Polaroids Showing the Evolution of the Lisa GUI [video]

The museum itself is not so special, but it's run by all these retired volunteer industry veterans that have incredible stories to tell, and they are such delightful and smart people. They were the ones at the front-lines when everything was starting.

My favorite part about the Computer History Museum is the events they hold occasionally where they have live interviews and demos from legendary figures in computing. Over the years I've been to events celebrating the 45th anniversary of the Xerox Alto (including a live demo of Smalltalk-76 run by Dan Ingalls on a Xerox Alto!), the 40th anniversary of the Apple Lisa, and the 40th anniversary of the original Apple Macintosh. There's also a chance to meet legendary figures in person. I've met and had conversations with Dan Ingalls, Yoshiki Ohshima (who is a long-time collaborator of Xerox PARC legend Alan Kay), Charles Simonyi (created the Bravo word processor at Xerox PARC, became wealthy at Microsoft, and founded Intentional Software), Marshall Kirk McKusick (BSD), David Ungar (created the Self programming language), and Donald Knuth (The Art of Computer Programming, Concrete Mathematics, TeX, and much more).

I'm also a fan of the museum's recorded interviews with legendary figures and the digital artifacts they have, including source code to historical projects.

One of the best parts about living near Silicon Valley, in my opinion, is being able to meet and converse with people who made significant contributions to computing, since many of them live in Silicon Valley. While the cost of living is a challenge (I'm a tenure-track professor who teaches CS and thus I don't have a FAANG salary, not to mention I don't get bonuses or stock grants), it's great being able to be in close proximity to the people who encouraged me to pursue a career in computing.