I’ve just returned from the Deloitte Technology Fast 50 awards dinner where Splunk was selected as the fastest growing company in Silicon Valley. Delloite, Silicon Valley Bank, Korn Ferry International, Cornish & Carey, Cooley Goward Kronish and adb Insurance Services were the sponsors of this year’s competition and we thank them all for the award.

I was joined at the awards dinner by my two co-founders Erik Swan and Rob Das. What a great ride it has been over the past four and a half years. The time has flown by so quickly and it seems like we still have so much more to do. But it was nice at least for one evening to take a breather and enjoy what we have accomplished.

Since I graduated from college with a degree in computer science I have dreamed of creating a technology and a company that had the potential to achieve what Splunk has. Seems unreal that we are now here living that dream.

The award ceremony was held at the Computer History Museum in MountainView, CA. What a cool place. When the Boston Computer Museum closed in 1999 the museum in Silicon Valley became the keeper of computer technology history. Wandering through the museum I spotted an exhibit on chess software competition and was reminded by one of the long job outputs hanging from the ceiling of my own chess playing Pascal program that performed a pretty good six level look ahead algorithm.

But it was entering the hardware history wing that really sent me down memory lane.

PDP8s, PDP11s, original IBM PC, Osborne, Apple Lisa, Apple IIc, Mac 128k, Compaq luggable, Apple Powerbook 170 and 230 with that cool ejectible enclosure that hooked up all your cables for you. Wow!

I even saw an IBM 5100. Perhaps the most bizarre machine I ever programmed. It has a switch that moves the shared program and memory space from APL to Basic - two worlds that should never co-exist.

When I was at IBM in Boca Raton I wrote an inventory management system on a 5120 the predecessor with a 9 inch screen!

If you’ve never been to the museum you really should go. Take your kids. Show them the progress technology has made during your adult lifetime and let them dream about the next 25 years.

Where else can you sit on the built in sofa of a Cray 1 supercomputer and see a PDP1 still working to play the world’s first video game?

Thanks to all the sponsors for hosting the event and selecting Splunk as the fastest growing company in Silicon Valley!