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Gates Donates $15M to Preserve Computing History
Dan-DAFC writes "The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is donating the sum of $15 million to the Computer History Museum in California, according to the BBC. The money is the biggest single gift in the museum's $125 million fund-raising campaign, which is still $50 million short of its target. The funds raised will be used to add more exhibits and educational programs."
I'm glad their web site is full of tiny pictures with unreadable text. Example here. I suppose I have to visit the museum in person and pay admission to find out what that diagram says. On the other hand, I could probably look at it elsewhere on the web, for free, and with much more information surrounding it.
well worth a look if you can't make it there yourself.
I don't know if I'd say that, though. Many people's first experience of computers were with DOS (still Microsoft, I know, but not Windows), Apple II, Apple Macintosh, Commodore 64, Amiga, and probably a plethora of other platforms from the late 70s and 1980s that I forgot to mention. And then we have some old-timers here who were introduced to vacuum tubes, punch cards, IBM mainframes, PDP-11s, and some other ancient stuff.
Computers have been around for about 60 years now, and they have been in Joe Average's workplace for about 25. I'm pretty sure that except for the youngest generation, most people have been exposed to computing prior to Windows dominating the market.
I wonder if his money will go to finding and preserving an old copy of the Apple IIe children's game, Z-bug, which was supposed to teach kids to type. That's a bit of computing history I remember, but can't find any references to even on the 'Net. I'm not making that up either, so don't mod me down. It was a piece of my childhood. It probably won't make it to the history of computing, though, because no one seems to remember it. Also reminds me of the ZamJak 72v. At least some people DO remember that crappy platform (http://www.zamjak72g.net./ Mostly just to make fun of, though. I think it was a basement computer enthusiast's attempt to get rich, but who didn't quite have a Bill Gates story in him.
The Bill Gates foundation is pretty nice. Even though I support Linux, they have kept our school computers very nice. For example, we recieve upgrades almost every two years, and we just upgraded almost a week ago to 2.8 Celeron D's in our whole school. When our network was only 10BaseT, they helped us upgrade to 100BaseT, speeding login times. Of course, there are the disadvantages, with MSIE only, and Word, but there's always PortableFirefox and PortableOpenOffice!
Student Research and Development
How about re-releasing MS-DOS 6.22 and MS WfW 3.11 as open source so as to get kiddies in Africa and South-East Asia into computing. You never know, it just may stop those kids from getting hooked on Linux. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
Mongrel News all the news that fits and froths
This is a seriously insane museum collection of computer history. Apparently $45K wouldn't do it, but I certainly think getting saving all these old machines for posterity would be worth it.
_ W0QQitemZ8706273723QQcategoryZ4193QQrdZ1QQcmdZView Item
http://cgi.ebay.com/Classic-Vintage-PC-Collection
(And no I'm not the seller, or related to him/her in any way)
No reason for Gates to be listed in that crowd. Those selected are hard core R&D technical people. Gates isn't a technical type, he is a businessman. Steve Jobs is missing for the same reason.
Further, the whole thing started at the time he got sued by the govt. It was originally a PR exercise.
Still, it is doing some good work.
The offensive idea that you can trust a corporation with the future of society when everybody knows that for the majority of corporations, the sole reason for their exisitence is to generate profits for themselves regardless of the cost to society as long as it is legal, or breaking the law causes so little effect it is still profitable to do so or the very worst act of all, using their fiscal influence to alter the laws when the affect upon society is palpable harm but that is okay because they are going to generate extra profits for themselves (well at least senior management gets the opportunity to cash up and brokers and major shareholders get to pump and dump legally).
If you are unhappy about the way your government is spending your tax dollars become involved in the political process and do something about. Don't expect greed driven corporations to do it for you because they are just doing it to you whilst marketing the idea of political indifference so that you wont become involved and you will let them run your life and all the lives of the people around you for no better purpose than to satisfy the lusts and ego of the very few who actually profit from this deceitful fraud.
Now really what else would you expect when the story comes out about willie donating money to a computer museum other than, yeah as long as the museum records his version of computing history and says really, really nice things about him and the board of Microsoft, true or not it is still funny, well at least for everyone else apart from willie and his buddies ;-).
If willie wanted people to say nice things about him he should have focused on doing nice things but no he focused on making as much money for himself as possible and is now attempting to buy a nice reputation for himself with a minor percentage of that money, I tell you what, when he gives all of it away like he said he was going to then I will give him the benefit of the doubt, until then nahh he got the reputation he earned ;-).
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
The computer history museum website has a "Hall of fellows section" Which is described as:
For over a decade, the Computer History Museum has been publicly recognizing individuals of outstanding merit who have contributed to the development of computing. Chosen on the basis of accomplishment--formal education is not a factor--are nominated by a panel composed of Museum staff, industry peers, and former Fellows.
At least 10 years must have elapsed between a specific contribution and an individual's nomination in order to properly assess the historical importance of his/her achievements. The contribution must thus be of a foundational nature, one that has strongly influenced the intellectual, disciplinary, or industrial underpinnings of computing.
Bill gates is not on this list, because he has stifled development more than contributing to it... I imagine part of the terms for this donation will be that he gets listed..
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