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Vintage Computer Festival Shows Off Ancient PCs
Markgor writes "Just finished looking through some pictures from the recent Vintage Computer Festival in Marlboro, Massachussetts, the first time that it's been held on the East coast. The best pic has to be the one of the Sol-20. Here in Ottawa, we have a bunch of vintage computers sitting in one of our museums, including an Altair, but I haven't seen an intact Sol-20 in a long long time"
I used to work in Ottawa at the museum of science and tech, during the time where they were shifting their computer structure around. We used to have a hall of computers, and there were displays and booths that taught kids about electronics and circuitry through hands on information... kids could manipulate magnetic core memory, and see the information being changed in real time, and have it read back off the core... Ping pong balls and pinball plungers were arranged in such a way that gates were represented in a way which they could wrap their heads around... Oh, and best of all, EVERY computer on display was functional, including the Crown 'micros' from the 60s... every kid got their name or a phrase given to them on a small piece of punch tape printed by devices older than their parents... but it was also kept current, all the way up to the PCs and Macs of the day (this was around 1995). Then the museum got a huge cash infusion from Microsoft and Intel, and suddenly all of the vintage historical machines either got put into storage (some were lucky enough to make it onto display, such as the right arithmetic wing of an old USAF computer) but not in a functional state... hands on became kids sitting in front of twenty pcs playing the latest microsoft educational software and browsing a very limited intranet... as well as easy access to hotmail. I quit my job at the museum after this, and never looked back. I'm throughly disappointed in the computing section that exists at the NMSTC now... it's still in the same state it was in 1995.
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