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.
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?
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!"
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.
...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.
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]