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.
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...
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]