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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?"
I think I might be able to fit a few more computers in to my bedroom. Bring 'em on I say!
Look up! It's all the space you could ever use!
you can use my landfill in China but you must pay me $20 per item to haul this poisonous shit away to a country without stupid laws or status quo's against official bribes.
I can use the hard drives to generate free electricity
Let me in on the final solution, since I have quite a large amount of computer crap, including:
And that's just the stuff I can see without turning my head. And based on other stories/comments/etc., I KNOW I'm nowhere near the worst "collector" out there.
I'll store a few away, I've got some space right here on my desk. Don't happen to have any new 3.0+ghz boxes that need to be 'stored'?
--fetch daddy's blue fright wig, i must be handsome when i release my rage
Hmm, I suppose a "Computer Museum" (considering the speed of technology) would be the only type of museum Australia could really have...
I've heard the paintings in the Australian art museum are almost dry now.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
It's in Sydney.
You find it buried on this page - looks like its currently at a self storage center in Sydney. (Near where the olympic village was).
Why post an Auscentric article like this to a USian site is beyond me, but for those interested, the map is here
This is a great cause for the government to step in, wouldnt you agree? I love knowing about the past computers, how they were concieved, what happened that brought us here. I suspect the next generation would be just as curious. To loose this would be a total disaster.
If they can not find something, the goverment should find something for them, even if its temporary, until the find somewhere permeant!!
Giving IE users a taste of their own medicine since 2005 - http://pods.-is-a-geek.net/
You're asking me?
I have a house full of old computers and typewriters and terminals...and then there is stuff in storage and more stuff at friends and relatives houses...you're on your own. And don't look for someone to buy it as scrap...they'll spend their time trying to get you to take more junk off their hands.
Museum....is that what you call it? That's rich...very funny. I tried that line years ago, and no one fell for it then, so I think you need to face up to the fact that you have a lot of junk...just like everyone else.
When I stood for election to the Australian Computer Museum core team nearly two years ago, many of you will recall that it was after a long series of debates during which I maintained that too much organisation, too many rules and too much formality would be a bad thing for the project.
Today, as I read the latest discussions on the future of the Australian Computer Museum project, I see the same problem; a few new faces and many of the old going over the same tired arguments and suggesting variations on the same worthless schemes. Frankly I'm sick of it.
Australian Computer Museum used to be fun. It used to be about doing things the right way. It used to be something that you could sink your teeth into when the mundane chores of programming for a living got you down. It was something cool and exciting; a way to spend your spare time on an endeavour you loved that was at the same time wholesome and worthwhile.
It's not anymore. It's about bylaws and committees and reports and milestones, telling others what to do and doing what you're told. It's about who can rant the longest or shout the loudest or mislead the most people into a bloc in order to legitimise doing what they think is best. Individuals notwithstanding, the project as a whole has lost track of where it's going, and has instead become obsessed with process and mechanics.
So I'm leaving core. I don't want to feel like I should be "doing something" about a project that has lost interest in having something done for it. I don't have the energy to fight what has clearly become a losing battle; I have a life to live and a job to keep, and I won't achieve any of the goals I personally consider worthwhile if I remain obligated to care for the project.
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.
My life in the land of the rising sun.
Quit tryin' to use Slashdot as your own personal eBay.... ....So, how much for that dual PPro? :)
Get rid of the duplicates, or at least keep no more than two of a kind (hey, it worked for Noah). The magazines and crap can either be recycled or take the choice ones only (and scan them in).
Once you have the collection down to a more manageable size, then ask for help. Storing loads of junk at someone else's expense is a little much to ask.
Or, have a yard sale and give the shit away. At least _someone_ might enjoy it. A Beowulf cluster of junk collectors, if you will. Cost: zero.
I saw a show on television which claimed that some parts of the outback don't get measurable rainfall for years at a time. Why not haul all this stuff to the outback and throw a tarp over it? I read that 95% of Australia is empty desert so this seems like the perfect solution. Old mines are a good bet too. Salt mines are very popular with folks who want to store stuff.
Most of the suggestions so far are "Bring 'em on!" and dump it in a landfill. Sigh, moderators on crack.
In case of the normal computer museums I've seen we're not talking about your average PC or even an Apple 2. Sure, I have ~30 computers in storage and most of the space goes for big VAXen and PDPs but normal museums have huge mainframes, like IBM 360s and like.
It is history worth preserving and a magnificent history at that. Think of all the IBMs, DEC-machines (KL-11 anyone ?), Crays, Burroughs machines and even old tube/relay-based number crunchers.
You ignorant twats can't appreciate anything older than a Amd Athlon.
... there was plenty of space in the outback...
You're right, I wouldn't steal a car. But if it were possible, I sure as hell would download one!
This is Australia for god's sake!! If you can't find a spare 1000 m^2 in Australia you really are not looking very hard! How about doing something like that airplane park out in Nevada? Build a shed, cover it with Kangaroo repellant, stick everything in there and deal with it later.
And they can take the antique POS I use at work there when they do it.
They should pick out the significant stuff or things that introduced some new technology and get rid of the rest!
I don't go asking others to store all the stuff that I have around the house, if I want to recover some space then I sort through it and throw the useless stuff out... but that takes some effort so I don't do it very often, maybe they are as lazy as me?
--- No 16-bit support in Vista? Half of our modules still use it! ---
Otherwise known as approximately 31.6 metres by 31.6 metres. Not that much.
What we see depends on mainly what we look for. -- John Lubbock Now search for that bug slave!
1400 Smith St in Houston, TX. Enron's headquarters is a gigantic 50-story building and is only using about 10 of those floors now.
That's 40 floors of free space.
Mirror here
- 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.
www.6502asm.com - Code 6502 assembly or.. DIE!!
I guess I should thought befor I wrote
You're new here aren't you?
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
Computer history is still critical. What happens is that everybody throws the manuals away, throws the machines away, and then twenty years later some bright fellow looks at all the people who are still being crippled for life or killed by bomblets in Vietnam. He thinks about the ongoing efforts to clean the countryside up and has an idea. "Hey, don't we have records of approximately where we dropped those?" "Sure," somebody says, "they're on the tapes in vault A-217X."
Well, the bright fellow goes down to the vault, gets the tapes, and finds that many of them haven't crumbled. Problem is, he doesn't have a machine to read them, so first he has to build a new drive to read the tape, then he has to re-engineer the computer and OS that were used to make the tapes, then he has to figure out what the bombing codes on the tape stand for. This is real life, not a hypothetical.
So you never know what might help, or even save lives. It has all the value that recording any kind of history has. These people aren't just piling this stuff up in a room. That would indeed be collecting junk, since a dead computer is merely a metal curiousity. You can hardly learn anything comparing a computer from 1980 to one from today by gross phsyical examination. The goal is to keep the machines operational on a constant basis. We need to keep in contact with that history, and a country the size of Australia certainly should be able to support a museum as large as a Wal-mart, let alone the small actual size of this thing.
It's a little like scoffing at the idea that any library need ever be as large as the Library of Congress just because you don't need such a thing in your neighbourhood. A whole country may very well need one.
the bluebrain wrote:
:-) But if you really want one, you might want to check out some of the old stuff at eBay from time to time... If you have a few bucks spare, you might want to take a look at this one, perfect condition -- but hurry, only 10 hours left! :-)
:)
> You've got an Oric? Gimme!
I won't sell it for anything in the world
But seriously, eBay is a great spot for buying old computers.
Well, especially if you're a fanatic nostalgic like me.
www.6502asm.com - Code 6502 assembly or.. DIE!!
I thought that thing Agent Smith put in Neo's gut looked suspiciously like a vacuum tube...
Opportunity knocks. Karma hunts you down.
Also, if the porning process is also going to involve the cordless drill and the slimjim, I'd definitely be asking more than five bucks.
- SMJ - (It's not just a name: it's a bad aftertaste.)
I'm running out of space myself, and if i can't solve it quick I'll have to give up my collection of MFM hardrives...
Schrodinger's cat is either dead or really pissed off...
Museum looking for space
I would just tell them to look up during the night. You can't miss it.
(Spudley Strikes Again!)
The processor was on three or four boards, but then you had memory and peripheral controllers on additional boards. Subsequent models were faster and often smaller.
A fairly minimal 11/40 installation would occupy a medium sized rack. With a second hard disk you had to have a second or use a full-sized rack.
Jumping to to the next message, pdp-11 style:
(Used by threaded code compilers like Fortran)
See my journal, I write things there
Probably 100 kilograms of 8086 PCs
So, including the cases and drives, that works out to about.. two of them? =)
Bitchslapped. Neat.
This is Sydney, unfortunately. If you own a spare 1000 m^2 in Sydney, then you're already a millionaire. And that's without even building anything on it. Property prices have become obscene in the last few years. A shed covered with kangaroo repellent would probably sell for a cool $300k in Sydney. More, dependent on position.
DeeK
Seriously, if there are significant machines in the collection (and there certainly appear to be), and the alternative is the dumpster (shudder!), the Aussie museum should contact them ASAP and see what can be arranged.
Australian Computer Museum Looking For Space
What a coincidence, the Australian Space Museum is looking for computers! Why don't they just trade?
Use Ctrl-C instead of ESC in Vim!
I couldn't imagine what this sounds like, so for the benefit of other underachievers of the American public high-school system, I took to Google and the OED. It means a token rent. In actual use, it may refer to the rent paid on an object whose lease term has expired, so that the rent just reflects the decreased value of the object, and is typically about 2-3% of the original cost, or one month's payment per year.
The OED had some charming quotes about people who paid annual rent of a peppercorn.
Good luck to the museum!