Journeys›Photograph

Berkeley Day, Rigetti to La Marcha

·Berkeley, California·#winter#bay area#urban-scene#berkeley#tapas
A moss 'rigetti' sign on a white wall, with sun shadows and a window overlooking trees and a street.

The anchor of the day was a visit to Rigetti Computing at 775 Heinz Avenue in Berkeley — the quantum computing outfit Chad Rigetti founded in 2013, building superconducting quantum integrated circuits here while running their fab, Fab-1, over in Fremont. Their lobby logo is spelled out in moss, letters a couple feet tall, and along the windows they've set out a poster series of old machines. 003/008 is the IBM SAGE, the NORAD air-defense computer that weighed 550,000 pounds; 004/008 is the Cray 1, $7.9 million in 1975 with 8.39 megabytes of memory. A reasonable lineage to claim if your business is the next computer.

After dark we were on San Pablo under the La Marcha sign, the tapas bar's takeout banner still hanging from the second floor.

Then across the bay to stay over in San Francisco. From high above Yerba Buena Gardens the next morning, SFMOMA's spiral logo sat below the window and the sun came up over the water, a ship or two out past the rooftops.

A Rigetti poster of an IBM Sage computer sits on a window sill, with a plant and cars visible outside.A poster about Rigetti and Cray 1 computers, with blue block illustrations, sits on a wooden shelf next to a small potted plant.A nighttime street scene featuring La Marcha Tapas Bar with illuminated signs and a brick building.A cityscape at sunset with tall buildings, a park, and an orange sky over a body of water.

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