Slashdot Mirror
Australian Computer Museum Needs a Saviour
femto writes "The Sydney Morning Herald is
reporting that the
Australian Computer Museum (archive.org) is to
close due to lack of funds. It is the largest computer collection in Australia. Failing an offer of a permanent home, they need storage space or money to pay for it. They also need some way to sort the collection."
Beyond the /. crowd, nobody really cares. They need to somehow figure out how to appeal to a broader audience. This isn't meant to be a troll, I believe it's the truth.
To keep this museum alive.
Sure it may only hold 100 years of information right now (a guess on years) but give it another 100 to 200 years our great great great grandchildren will want to see our first computers.
It's easier to save the hardware now instead of trying to find it in the next 100 years.
Pretty much the same is happening in the UK with Bletchley Park, with no government funding these museums are dying away. Perhaps it's because they are deemed as modern history (after all, computing has only really taken off in the last 60 years), or because the majority of the public just don't understand anything beyond their TV remote control, but it's a shame nonetheless. Bletchley should be relabelled as something "non-geeky", and the Australian one should be merged with a larger industrial museum, after all, these are the machines that took the Industrial Age onto the Information Age...
"They can be quite interesting, but how many people are interested in that motherboard from the 80's?"
I doubt very much that such a museum would be bothered about displaying old PC motherboards at all.
Most of the good stuff would be from the late seventies and really early eighties, PC's that are totally unlike the ubiquitous x86 compats we know these days.
I'm talking about things such as the old Trash 80's and Commodore PETs. Being an Aussie museum I'm sure they even have a good selection of "Australias Own Personal Computer", the venerable Z80 based "microbee".
Those were the true glory days of computer hacking. The very first microbee's came as a PCB and a box of components. It was up to the owner to solder all the resistors, caps and chips into their proper places!
I saw a bloke once who wasn't quite clued up on the whole "solder" thing. He decided to superglue everything onto the PCB instead.
"You can't fight in here, this is the war room!"