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."
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
Help Fight SPAM today!
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...
"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!"
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?
>> 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.
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.
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]