Slashdot Mirror
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!
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
There's always under ground, near the Earth's core, where it's still warm. Live long enough, you might even see it...
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
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.
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.
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"
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.)
Museum looking for space
I would just tell them to look up during the night. You can't miss it.
(Spudley Strikes Again!)
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