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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."
You mean, like, 486's?
/me ducks.
I just read some sad news on CNN.com - computer geek/futurist/programmer Bob Bemer died on Tuesday at his home in Texas. He died at age 84 after a long battle with cancer. I'm sure we'll all miss him, even if you weren't a fan of his work there's no denying his contribution to computer science. Truly a geek icon.
the Australian Computer Museum... need[s] storage space... [and] some way to sort the collection.
While Bubble Sort is always a sentimental favorite, I suggest Heapsort for its O( n log n) runtime, even in the worst case, and, even more importantly given the Museum's lack of storage space, Heapsort's use of only a fixed amount of extra space in which to do the sort.
Also, there is a BSD'd Heapsort implemented using forklifts and standard warehouse storage crates.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
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.
If they have any G5 Macs, they can store them at my place.
Wouldn't chonologically be the obvious way?
I hate grammar Nazi's.
I mean, I like them. They can be quite interesting, but how many people are interested in that motherboard from the 80's? Maybe 1/300 (random statistic, hopefully somewhere near correct, atleast for around here). I like computer museums, but I'd think that their would be lack of interest, and have always wondered how the low amount of people they get is enough to sustain them. I mean, lots of people go, but compared to just about any other large museum (at least around here, the Boston Computer Museum is huge), they really don't get that many people, and it costs a lot to run. I'd think that most computer museums would have gone the way of this one a long time ago, however unfortunetly
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Too bad people do not think that computer history is just as important as any other.
On top of closing their site is slashdotted, must we kill their bandwidth also?
I think old computers are ugly. I can appreciate the old mechanical machines, they are a true work of art, but old boxes of transistors and PCB's are just not pleasing in any way.
If some work went into aesthetic design (e.g. Apple) or were exceptioanlly groundbreaking or they defined culture (e.g. old arcade cabinets) they would be interesting but in my personal opinion they aren't (feel free not to share my point of view).
It is sort of like setting up an old dishwasher museum really. Technology has advanced but they're not that interesting to look at either.
Emulators preserve the real point of interest in old computers.
Just install netBsd on all that hardware, including the mechanic ones, and host some p0rn.
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...
A Tech University (the MIT equivalent in OZ, for example) is the logical spot for such a thing, then the nerds have easy access, causual visitors can lookin in, and the average citizen can opt for the Wax Museum instead.
Yeah, I guess I'm funny like that.
"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!"
This dupe story is over a year old!!!
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Most people don't see any difference between the box that sits on their desktop at work today to the one that would have in 1980, let alone understand enough to make an exhibit like this interesting.
Apart from which Australia has a rather small, widely spread population, so niche markets are harder to sustain.
It's just not a viable private enterprise out here. Perhaps the Powerhouse Museum, which tends to focus on technology and industry, could aquire some of the better pieces.
I am part of a group seeking to establish a museum of electronics and radio in another, smaller Australian city. If all goes well, we might even have a quite exceptional site coming our way.
It's necessary not only to have a suitable "business case" but to make it work! The problem is that there still has to be a critical mass of people who are savvy about electronics -- or just interested -- who come through the door to make it viable. Repeat visits is the next issue.
I wish them good fortune, and I'll be bringing their plight to the attention of our group. Maybe we can assist "if it all turns to custard".
Looking at space, radio, science and computing from a 'down-under' amateur enthusiast perspective.
It might even be an upgrade. I can't imagine them being much older than the stuff they're running now.
I'm surprised the Powerhouse Museum hasn't stepped in to field this one. It's the sort of thing I'd have expected to find there...
...just come to my workplace here in Sydney - they have IBM Mainframes, SNA, Connect Direct, even Windows 95 for god's sake!
Please don't send a Word document when a text file will do the job.
I'm torn when it comes to saving computer history.
On one hand, nostalga runs deep with machines I spent a long time with. My Timex Sinclair, C64 and 486 computers were hard to depart with because of how much I learned and enjoyed using them. My G5 is starting to get that way too and I haven't even had it that long. I almost went looking for an old VAX machine to buy to re-live some of my college days (thank god for my wife, she was the voice of reason that day). So I can understand why people would want to preserve these machines.
On the other hand, old computers are (in the grand scheme of things) not that old. If we keep museums filled with each generation of computer then every couple of years we have to add a handful of computers to the stock. The industry moves so fast it's difficult to decide what's historical and what's not (aside from a few computers). So I can understand why people wouldn't be interested in a museum of computers (a dull subject for many to begin with).
I guess I have to fall back on the phrase "when in doubt, don't pay out." Sorry, guys.
how can the call it a museum if the stuff is not even sorted? it looks like a warehouse full of old computer parts that need to be sorted (not a museum). Maybe they should concentrate on sorting and taking out the good stuff before lobbying to have them saved.
did you forget to take your meds?
Computers are not that historical. You might think that they are (no, not you trash80), but they are not.
I've been to the computer museum up in Boston (I think it is now part of the Museum of Science) and the Smithsonian American National Museum. In the latter case, the computers are part of a bigger exhibit that hightlights the Information Age. In this case think things like, telegraph, radio, televison, computers, etc...
At the end there is an interactive exhibit that kids can play with. The same held true for the one up in Boston, but I went there many years ago.
I think that many people were staring at me and my brother when we were bowing down to a lifesize picture/cutup of Seymour Cray (next to a bunch of CDC's). I'm not worthy! I'm not worthy!
Finally, I saw my first Craw 1 at the Smithsoniam Air and Space Museum. This was great as I was tired and I could sit down (check out a picture of the Cray 1 and you will understand what I'm saying). They also had a display of real magnetic core memory. Most of you don't know what a true core dump really means!
>> It is the largest computer collection in Australia.
That reminds me about the Presidential library that burned down. They lost both books. And he hadn't finished coloring one of them yet.
The Kensington Science Museum has early computers, all the way back to Babbage. The first locomotive, the first lathe, Watt's first steam engine - they have it all. And that stuff you can at least figure out by looking at it.
Electronics is much worse to display. The Henry Ford Museum used to have display cases full of early electronics ("Capacitor, Cornell-Dublier, circa 1932"), ignored by almost everybody.
It also depends on the scale in which progress happened. The plough didn't change in many many centuries, and changes to it were progressive and slow. Same with many many technologies, but computing was so fast, and expansive, changing the way everything (including your "Mix" stations) operates. Nothing in the history of human kind has required such a constant learning curve, and such a dramatic upheaval of life as we know it. And this is not important enough to be put on display?
Who cares that my grand mother can still remember the days when the Panasonic factory was just fields? The timescale is irrelevant. Look at car museums, they're hardly THAT much older (add an extra 50 years), and yet they are massively popular. Why? Because they're sexy, computers aren't (especially old ones like the Commodore PET). Does this mean they are any less important? No. However, in my opinion, they should be showed in a correct, and informative context. I don't want to see some ancient mainframe system without seeing the impact of what it actually did. I want to see how these things have made our lives better (or worse). I want to see the impact they've had on the world. I don't want to see a room full of beige TVs.
One of the things that makes a museum interesting is the presentation of the pieces they have on display. On the other hand, if the pictures on this museum's site are any indicator, presentation is something they've missed completely. If you want people to come see a museum, you need to teach them something while they're there. I'd be interested in going to see a whole bunch of old computers sitting in a warehouse, but I don't think there are many people like me.
"If English was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for everyone else."
They should build the world's least powerful Beowulf cluster.
> Australian Computer Museum Needs a Saviour
Have they asked Jesus for help?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I *still* have my first computer: an old IMSAI 8080 I built from a kit. It still works. I even have cross compilers for it so I can still generate code for it when the PC came out.
The machine ran at a whopping 2 MHz.
I had 12 Kilobytes of EPROM.
4 Kilobytes of VideoRam ( Yup, I could drive four monitors independently ... each 16 lines of 64 characters. )
I had all remaining 48 Kilobytes of address space filled with 2102 1Kx1 450nS RAM, best you could get, in those days. It took six S-100 cards to hold them all... you could only get 8K on a card... and even then you had thermal problems.
And you know, when I turned the system on, I had system ready prompt by the time the monitor filaments warmed up enough to display an image.
And the pages would scroll past so fast they could not be read. I could prepare a whole new screen in one vertical retrace inverval. On a 2 MHz machine! Oooh, the wonders of assembly language.
Would I want to go back... well, uh, no. You see, it took weeks for me to code a barely operable word processor. And forget the luxury of C. If I wanted a float, I had a major programming project on my hands. I could only play with 8 bits at a time. A tic-tac-toe logic game was par for the course for making a decent computer demo. Even a rudimentary multiply was a royal pain...calculating trancendentals to any degree of accuracy could take several seconds.
But it *was* fun. And there was lots of blinking lights on that old box that made it even look like it was doing something... not these bland boxes of today whose only indication they are doing anything at all is maybe a disk access light.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
An old calculator is interesting to play with, but it's not exactly a gem from emperor's crown. By that standard, most of us have a "museum" in some closet. They took everything offered and of course they ended up with a pile of useless junk that will be (and should be) thrown away.
So what's valuable? Well, for one thing technologies that are no longer used today, in components that are still functional and that people can understand by looking at them. Like a working punch card reader/writer, or the original "tty" dump terminal with a daisy wheel printer.
For most of other things, emulation is the way to go. There is something to be said for teaching CS101 using a computer where programs are entered by storing machine code in memory with dip switches and then explaining how things have evolved. But it's probably cheaper to just make a modern device with the same interface that fits in the pocket.
As a small child I was taken on a school excursion to a museum that featured nothing but depression era biscuit tins. I kid you not. If Australia can support that, then surely it can support a reasonably sized space somewhere to stick a few random bits of hardware by forcing every ten year old in Sydney to visit it at least once.
Even better, put that sucker in Canberra and make it part of that essential round of things kids do on their school camp to the capital. What geek in NSW/ACT doesn't still foster fond memories of Questacon?
At a university open day a couple of years ago I got stuck supervising the computer science stand, and it's gotta be said that a lot of teenagers were fascinated by the various bits of crap the school had dug out to show them - disk platters a metre in diameter with labels on them saying "1 Mb" , actual transistors and so forth. If you present it in an amusing way (imagine a 40Gb iPod made out of a stack of these!) it could work. Even better if you can get some of the computers working.
All that said, it is ground that is at least partially covered by the Powerhouse in Sydney (although their computer history bit needed some work last time I was there) and Questacon (now renamed something lame like the National Science Museum) in Canberra. A partnership with those and similar organisations is probably a good idea.
I've seen the Boston Computer Museum - it's very good. But we are aiming smaller to start with, and to be interesting too. Much hands-on stuff, where possible. INCLUDING the original UNIX s/w!
Folks in the UK might like to take a look at the museum of computing in Swindon, UK. http://www.digitalhistory.org.uk. It's a small-scale operation that needs your support too. I couldn't compare the this one with the Australian one, but we do need to preserve our history.
We have a local 'museum' for this kind of stuff. Sorting it is easy - they just mix it together with all kinds of other useless stuff, and keep it outside in a large heap.
I stole this
The pictures (and the site) are a few years out-of-date, and really were a "trial run" of the website. When we get time (huh!) we will be posting much newer ones in a much better format site.
These people seem to be forgetting that they are storing computers - if they need a method of filing them I suggest they use the most recent computer in their archives. This would be making effective use of the resources until better funding could be arranged.
for old data conversion? I remember reading last year about a company which was loaning out older computers so that people who had old data could still read it and convert it to another format. Someone had one of those wonderful 5" floppy disks with a bunch of scientific data they had gathered back in the day and couldn't find any older computers that would still read it, until they went to a place with a bunch of old computers to read and convert the data. Another possibility is if you can get a place to store it, discuss with local schools and colleges if they'd be interested in doing low cost field trips.
-Gamma