🚀 go-pugleaf

p...@front.se (Per Lindberg) writes:

>he...@ruuinf.cs.ruu.nl (Henk P. Penning) and
>pet...@opus.cs.mcgill.ca (Peter Deutsch)
>writes about retiring old computers to museums rather scrapping them.

>Here in Stockholm, STACKEN, the computer club at the Royal Institute
>of Technology, has collected, restored, and re-installed old computers
>for many years now. We specialize in old DEC computers, mostly DEC-10s
>and DEC-20s. The last time I looked into our CCCC (Colossal Cave
>Computing Center) there was:

[Fascinating list deleted.]

Did anybody save a GIER?  Now there was a historic system!

Another thought on the preservation of computers: with all the modern
graphics capabilities, it should be possible to preserve *architectures*
even if you can't save or get running the actual machines.  One could
simulate consoles and other interfaces fairly readily today, and give
people the ability to see what it was like to program some of the old
beasts.  It ought to be fairly easy, for example, to simulate an IBM
650 console on a Sun workstation, bi-quinary lights, ten-position rotary
switches and all; other windows could simulate the 026, the 533 and the
402, so all the steps in program preparation and running could be
duplicated.  This would make historic technology available to a
wide range of students.  My list of candidate machines for "virtual
preservation" would include:

IBM 650 (more computing breakthroughs than any other machine)
LGP-30 (computing to the student masses; a PC the size of a food freezer)
GIER (for the love of Algol)
IBM 7090 (second to the 650 for breakthroughs)
Honeywell 800 (for its sheer weirdness)
Burroughs 220 (just personal)

and the DEC machines listed above.