🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <37...@ruuinf.cs.ruu.nl>, he...@ruuinf.cs.ruu.nl (Henk P. Penning) writes:
> Instead of scrapping our old computers, we (comp.sci.dept Utrecht Univ)
> want to archive them and maybe in 5-10 years time put them on display.
> 
> I would like to get in contact with people running such a scheme or
> actually running a 'computer museum'.
> 
> Mail to 'he...@cs.ruu.nl' if you have any experience with such things.

Sure, our Computer Centre runs a computer museum now. They
have a couple of IBM mainframes! :-) :-) :-)

Seriously, I have done the same thing. We moved buildings
a couple of years ago, and everyone told me to junk our
original micro lab, etc. Instead I've squirreled it all
away for the day when the first prof mutters "we should
never have thrown that out". Then, out will come the SWTP
PC, the original Apple II, The Kim board, the 6800
processor development kit, etc. Boat anchors? Maybe, but
important not to forget. Heck we have the Soroc terminals,
the Hazeltines, the old Decwriters, a few bits and pieces
of out Data General Eclipse and Nova III's (we had eight
wired together to form a dedicated parallel processing
machine long before the current generation "discovered"
the field. In my day, son, you wrote to a special memory
location in assembler to reboot the cluster and handled
your IPC by hardwired shared memory...


I've got the 300 baud modems, the flex O/S software
diskettes, the PDP-11 service manuals, the bits and pieces
of core memory, the spare PDP-11 UNIBUS card cage, the Vax
11/730 CPU in a half-height cabinet, a few 40 Meg disk
packs, the paper tape reader, .....


For what it's worth, our CC (really nice, people, really
they are) actually still have all the bits of their 704.
Their Director has promised to take me down and show me
one night, we just haven't had the time.


I'm sure if I put out a display now, someone will complain
about the waste of valuable space. Five or ten years from
now they'd all be kicking themselves. Somebody has to
protect the School from the heathens. I vote for computer
museums.


				- peterd


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+-------+ 	Peter Deutsch		McGill University
| u # u |	pet...@cs.mcgill.ca	School of Computer Science
|/\/\/\/|	
|  a a |	"As God is my witness, Andy. I thought that turkeys
 \  a  /	could fly!"
  \___/                           - Mr. Carlson, in WKRP in Cincinatti...
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