Australian Computer Museum Looking For Space

tqft writes "The Australian Computer Museum Society needs space. Basically they have nowhere to store their large collection of hardware. Can you help? Do you or your employer have the floor space they could use? Or should it all be trashed?"

Comments

May I propose a cardasian question?

[lingqi]

Why are humans soooo interested to keep all the old stuff around? I mean, being human I do realize that there are value in history - but am I the only one who thinks that some of this history can be re-created?

This can't be said about ecosystem because that's something we don't, and may not ever fully understand - so it is beneficial to keep species around because they can have potentially very important uses, but old computer hardware are stuff that was created by humans in the first place, so - despite some token items, why do we keep it all instead of dedicating resources to creating new and better stuff?

It's like a child who builds some lego creation but would not tear it down even though his current abilities in making lego based stuff are so much more advanced.

and, this question I think was asked on DS9, by who I forget - but certainly a Cardasian.

Re:I also have many crappy computers needing stora

[skurk]

IvyMike wrote:

• A fuzzy 17 inch monitor
  
• An old Indigo2 computer sans hard drive (and more imporantly, sans hard drive bracket.)
  
• A dual Pentium Pro 180, with 3 GB SCSI hard drive
  
• An old AMD computer, processor type forgotten. (Probably about a 400 Mhz) something.
  
• Some sort of IDE raid card
  
• About 12 hard drives totaling 8 GB of storage

When I was your age, we didn't have monitors. We used mom and dad's TV! The Indigo2 wasn't even planned at that point, dual CPU's and IDE disks were pure rocket science.

Since you call this fully useable equipment "old" (keep in mind, the stuff you mention make perfect *nix firewalls/servers), here's some of the stuff I've got at home, in my own personal little "museum" -- from the top of my head: Probably 100 kilograms of 8086 PCs, Oric-1, Apple ][, C64, Texas Instruments TI99/4A, lots of Amiga 500's, a few 68k Mac's, and lots of old game consoles (b&w ping pong).

Now that's the stuff that works. From the stuff that unfortunately doesn't work anymore, the list is too long. An example would be the extremly rare West PC 800, a "dual cpu" 6502/Z80 Apple][ clone made in Norway in the early eighties. It's so rare, I can't find any spare parts, nor info about it on the net. :(

Oh well.