Tag: South San Jose

South San Jose

Posted on

Almaden Quicksilver Miner Museum

Almaden Quicksilver Mining Museum

An interesting place. Also, once each summer they put on a “Play like a miner” event. Crafts, learning, gold panning for kids; its a good time to tour the museum in the historical Casa Grande mansion, as an adult or child, with so many extra activities and staff throughout the buildings and grounds. The displays and artifacts dealing with the historical mercury mining done in the area are intriguing.

Almaden Quicksilver Mining Museum
Almaden Quicksilver Mining Museum
Almaden Quicksilver Mining Museum
Posted on

RAMAC Park

At the base of the lamp post, and in several other places at the park and in the surrounding area, you can see the tile homage to the original and historical buildings that once stood here adorned with a tile mural, here where the disk drive was developed and so much more was invented at the one time San Jose IBM campus.

RAMAC Park is named after the first disk drive system. RAMAC stands for Random Access Method of Accounting and Control. It’s first level of development and invention occurred at the first California IBM laboratory in a rented building near the De Anza Hotel in San Jose. When the the new 190 acre IBM campus was ready on Cottle Ave., the lab moved to this south San Jose location and went on to innovate in big ways.

If you look around the park area today there is very little, but some, of the original tile mural work still up and visible. Other areas have covered the mural work to protect it, hopefully for a good and public purpose in the future.

A bit of the old tile mural, designed to symbolize the computer punch cards that originally played a role in bringing IBM out to San Jose, is visible past a security gate near RAMAC Park.