Australia's Largest Private Computer Collection In Pictures

Da Massive writes "UNIX PDP-7, a classic DEC PDP-8, the original IBM PC, Commodore's C64, Apple's Lisa, a MITS Altair 8800 made famous by Bill Gates, through to a working PDP-11 that plays the ADVENTURE and DUNGEON games. Max Burnet has got it all. Burnet has turned his home in the leafy suburbs of Sydney into arguably Australia's, if not the world's, largest private computer museum. Since retiring as director of Digital Equipment Corporation a decade ago, Burnet has converted his home into a snapshot of computer history. Every available space from his basement to the top floor of his two-storey home is covered with relics from the past. On top of his hardware collection are numerous punch cards, tape machines (including the original paper tape) and over 6000 computer reference books. So in demand is his collection that one Australian film called on him to recreate a computer setting (PDP-9) for a movie about the moon landing in 1969."

Comments

Even with all that notoriety...

[retech]

He's still struggling to justify all of it to his wife. It's a daily battle and hopefully, one day, she'll think it's cool having all that gear in the house. Just remember to wipe your feet if you visit.

Re:Even with all that notoriety...

[rbanffy]

I can understand that.

I have an unusually nice wife and every acquisition is a historical achievement in the fine art of negotiation. I can only imagine how hard it is for him to keep all this gear in their home.

Favorite old-school, large computer! -Cray 2

[Nomadic_Z]

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a2/Cray_2_Arts_et_Metiers_dsc03940.jpg

Actually...

[femto]

Max Burnett is a founding member of the Australian Computing Museum Society and I think you will find the PDP9, and probably most of the rest, are part of its collection and that Mr Burdett is storing them since the ACMS does not have a permanent home. They were possibly collected by Mr Burnett in the first place and donated to the society, but they would still be part of the ACMS collection. Any ACMS members care to fill in the details?

Presumably you too could join the ACMS and after a while have a house full of vintage computers too! :-)

Re:Actually...

[JohnDeane]

Max Burnet started the collection, pretty much as 'Da Massive' says. It expanded into a Digital Users' Group then those folk formed ACMS in 1994. Max bought the initial collection when he retired and many subsequent donations have been made to ACMS. So there are two collections managed in a somewhat overlapping and cooperative way. And yes, the lack of a secure store/museum means that quite a lot of the material is in members' homes awaiting space for proper organisation, documentation and display. Sigh. (I'm the current President of ACMS)

One Australian Film?

[deniable]

Gee, were they talking about The Dish? They could have included the title.

Re:One Australian Film?

[Whiteox]

After all, we know that nothing really exists outside the US, don't we?

Except the World Series! Oh wait.....

Re:One Australian Film?

[deniable]

You mean The World Series?

The movie is called 'The Dish'

[Jacques Chester]

A brilliant little film about how Parkes, near Canberra, was the ground station that actually received the moon landing signal. Same guys as 'The Castle' and 'Bad Eggs', so naturally it's very funny too.

Re:The movie is called 'The Dish'

[thermian]

It was actually Honeysuckle Creek near Canberra that got the signal, but it was dismantled so Sich and co. based the film around Parkes, then filmed in Forbes. They're also the crew behind the Hollowmen.

Almost right.

Parkes didn't get the initial portion of the signal, but they got the moonwalk, since it was only Parkes that could handle video at the time. Honeysuckle dealt with the initial audio.

That's all the film claims, in fact they make it fairly clear that Parkes was late because of the difficulty with the moon being so low in the sky.

That page loads so slow....

[KozmoKramer]

That page loads so slow. It might be running on one of the relics on display in the museum. The pics are cool.

He has PDP-7 Unix???

[harlows_monkeys]

Back in the mid '80s, a friend of mine at Caltech, Fritz Nordby, was planning on celebrating the 15th anniversary of Unix by designing a PDP-7 clone on a chip, and making a limited production run. He contacted Ken and DMR to see if he could get a copy of PDP-7 Unix, and they said they didn't have one, and as far as they knew, no copies existed, and that was the end of the commemorative PDP-7 clone idea.

If this collector really has a PDP-7 running original Unix, someone should make a copy and offer it to Ken and DMR. Or make it available on the net (after getting suitable permission). Maybe for the 40th anniversary of Unix, someone could make a PDP-7 simulator to run it. (Hell, you could probably do it in Javascript on a modern desktop machine and be faster than a real PDP-7!)

Re:Oh, for Idol's sake!

[Enter the Shoggoth]

Sure! No problem!

As long as we get an American free day as well.

Can't we go even one day on Slashdot without an Australian "story"?

Why don't you Aussie /. editors just launch slashdot.org.au and be done with it?

Oh, right, of course... Because you know that only Australians (if anybody) would give a shit about slashdot.org.au, and the whole point of spamming this Slashdot is so that Americans will "notice" you.

I'm sure most geeks have a few old computers..

[Viol8]

...lying around the house. Problem is , while most of us of a certain age look back wistfully to times past when there was so much more variety in the computer ecosystem with cool ideas popping up left , right and centre - the truth is (and I speak from personal experience) that when on occasion you get those 8 bits or whatever out their box and fire them up you realise that actually , well, they're a bit rubbish really and computers today really are so much better. Still , its nice to preserve them , just not so much fun to use them!

I have my old zx spectrum.

[thermian]

I showed it to my son last year. He looked at it for a moment then asked me where the dvd drive was....

There are, it seems, some things a parent is best not sharing with a child.

Re:I have my old zx spectrum.

[Chrisq]

I know what you mean. I said "before they had mobile phones" to my daughter and some of her friends the other day. They looked at me as though I had said "before they invented the wheel"

Re:I have my old zx spectrum.

[William Robinson]

I showed it to my son last year. He looked at it for a moment then asked me where the dvd drive was....

There are, it seems, some things a parent is best not sharing with a child.

That's nothing. While explaining importance of disciplined backups to a group of freshers, I was telling this story of a screwup while upgrading hard disk. When I mentioned 'while upgrading the hard disk from 20MB to 40MB', these all freshers burst out with laughter. I somehow handled situation while saying, 'you would laugh more, if I tell the configuration of my first PC. 8088, 4.77MHz, 256KB, Dual floppy, CGA card with Monochrome Monitor'.

Sometimes difficult to explain the world we have lived with.

Re:I have my old zx spectrum.

[Viol8]

"these all freshers burst out with laughter."

Unfortunately that attitude seems to me to lead on to the rather flagrant waste of resources in modern software. A lot of the new coders think that because they so much resource available they don't need to make any attempt to make the program they're writing efficient in any sense - CPU, memory, disk , you name it. This also applies IMO to the fashion for compiling to VMs rather than raw machine code.

Re:I have my old zx spectrum.

[theaveng]

I disagree. For me pulling out my old Commodore 64 or Amiga 500 is as satisfying as firing-up the old Atari VCS, Nintendo ES, or Sega Genesis. I still enjoy playing those old 8/16 bit games, because even though they are 2-dimensional they are just as much fun as playing a Gameboy..... even the kids enjoy the old C=64 games when I hook them up.

As for productivity, well, I have experimented with GEOS 64 and text-based websurfing, and it works, the only flaw being the pace. GEOS works just great (like a black-n-white Macintosh) until you try to print something out and all you have is a dot-matrix printer. Or websurfing with a slow 2 kbit/s modem. Even so I still enjoy the nostalgia factor.

Re:I have my old zx spectrum.

[theaveng]

When I arrived at Penn State my dorm president gave my an old Commodore Amiga 2000HD with a 1 megabyte hard drive. I tried a couple times to reformat it to a larger size, but it stubbornly refused. So there I was, stuck with a hard drive no bigger than a floppy. Not too useful.

If some freshmen laughed at me I'd remind them that just in the time since they were born (circa 1990) to their first year of college, we've moved from 10 megahertz to 3000 megahertz, and from 1 megabyte to 4000 megabytes. Someday their "uberpowerful PC" will look pretty primitive when Intel develops 300 gigahertz Hydra-Cores with 2 terabytes of RAM. Technology moves very rapidly. (I'd also remind them that they're going to look back at their photos in ten years and laugh at themselves.)

Re:I have my old zx spectrum.

[DiLLeMaN]

My 7 year old son still mightily enjoys The Great Gianna Sisters. I think he has some sort of platform fetish, because he also loves Mario Bros on the DS and SuperTux on the Mac.

Some kids will be curious about the digital past. They'll want to learn about those ancient systems, and they'll wonder how we survived. Most, however, won't give a rat's ass.

Me, I was *delighted* when I found some ancient graphics beast the size of a small filing cabinet. I don't recall the brand, but I do remember googling them; they're still in business, but they do something with flight simulators nowadays. When I found them, it was already worthless junk, but it still fascinated me.

Re:I have my old zx spectrum.

[Evil Pete]

And you know in 20 years they will be in exactly the same position. Software and hardware will have progressed so much the youngsters will say: "what less than 20 cores?"

Re:I have my old zx spectrum.

[bazorg]

did you explain what CGA was? and why of those 4 colours, 2 were pink and light blue?

Re:I have my old zx spectrum.

[deniable]

Now, now, you could have black, white, cyan and magenta but you could also change the palette and have black, yellow, green and brown. You could also change from 320x200 to 640x480 resolution but then you'd only get black and one color from a selection of 16. After that EGA and VGA were amazing.

Google Cache Link

[Skythe]

http://72.14.235.132/search?q=cache:http://www.cio.com.au/article/268510/slideshow_--_tech_yesteryear_where_old_computers_find_their_final_resting_place

It's a shame

[Alioth]

It's a shame that most of these computers probably don't run any more - it's a bit like going to an aviation museum and seeing all these planes that will never fly again - it's a little bit sad. I'd love to see a museum with as much hardware *working* as possible - where you can see the blinkenlights, type something at the console, or whatever. Unfortunately, it's probably not very practical with many of these machines.

My own interest in the retrocomputing scene is the old 8 bit systems, and for those, it's very practical to play with them. The best thing about the old 8 bits is that they are fun. Modern computers, especially the ones running Windows, are no longer much fun to work on. Everything's closed up in secret recipes, EULAs, and corporate BS, and in any case there are layers and layers and layers of abstraction before you get to the hardware. Linux or BSD is of course infinitely better, and the reason I love open source software is it gives me the freedom to tinker. However, it's still extremely complex, and it can take a lot of code just to get something simple to happen - for instance, if you're making a piece of hardware, you've got to write a device driver before you can even start experimenting with your creation.

So I still love to tinker with 8 bit systems because it's fun and you can do some surprising things with them. Like, this weekend, I did streaming video on my Sinclair Spectrum: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hf8rz0sb298 - with an ethernet card that I made for the machine.

Re:It's a shame

[John_Sauter]

It's a shame that most of these computers probably don't run any more - it's a bit like going to an aviation museum and seeing all these planes that will never fly again - it's a little bit sad. I'd love to see a museum with as much hardware *working* as possible - where you can see the blinkenlights, type something at the console, or whatever. Unfortunately, it's probably not very practical with many of these machines.

Maybe not, but there are people who are restoring the old machines. Here is a video of a restored IBM 1401 running. Their web site is here.

Re:It's a shame

[Alioth]

I actually had bothered (despite the site being molasses slow), and many of them weren't actual complete computers but just front panels.

Re:It's a shame

[MBAFK]

The Computer Museum at Bletchley Park in England (where the first programmable digital electronic computer digital computer was made) has the majority of their exhibits working and they let you play with the computers on show.

http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/

Here is a Mac they had in the 8-bit room:
http://www.matthewgrove.co.uk/personal/moblog/view/2008-11-15/resized_15112008531.jpg

Re:Oh, for Idol's sake!

[Whiteox]

That's a brilliant idea!
We can do all the countries, not just Aus and USA.
Tomorrow could be 'Nigerian Free Week' where no stories on, about, referring to, alluding to, reflective upon and commented would a start.
So much for Net neutrality!

Who cares about these computers ?

[naden]

No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.

This museum needs a home and a benefactor(s).

[speleolinux]

It's a shame that CIO Magazine which goes to many business people who lead large computer companies made no mention that this museum needs help. Maybe they weren't asked, perhaps. Most of those machines will probably go to the wreckers. A few dedicated individuals maintain this museum at $1000/month out of their own pocket. Over the years of people asking for financial help and space not a single company is interested in helping to preserve this history. Nor has any Federal or State Govt come to help as they don't see that Australias track record in computing is important. Having immigrants answer a question about Don Bradman on their citizenship test is far more important. There are enough computer companies in Australia that owe so much to computer history that they should find a permanent place for this treasure and support it.

     

Re:This museum needs a home and a benefactor(s).

[TapeCutter]

"Having immigrants answer a question about Don Bradman on their citizenship test is far more important."

That question is an urban legend, it doesn't exist and it never has. Having said that, the rest of your post deserves a +5 informative.

Re:This museum needs a home and a benefactor(s).

[theaveng]

Instead of begging for handouts, why don't you try a free market approach - CHARGE for it. If I were in this guy's shoes, I would set up displays in my basement and charge an entrance fee to tourists to "come see the history of computing".

Another possibility is to join forces with a local car museum, to see if you can borrow an empty room for your computer history display. Since people are already looking at the old cars, they're likely to have an interest in anything that's old, including computers. Don't display everything, but just pick out a few key computers that changed the course of history and charge $1 to enter the room. Perhaps have one of them (like the C=64) setup to play a game (say Arkanoid).

Most of us are engineers. We're used to solving problems. "Funding" is just another problem to be solved; be creative.

stiffy

[JohanSteyn]

FTFA: The first floppy disk was 9 inches in diameter and very "floppy".

At my first job in the late '80's I worked on old Honeywell TDC4500's in a petrochemical plant in South Africa. I think they stopped making those machines in 1979, but due to sanctions and budget restrictions we kept using those trusty workhorses, which used 9 inch floppies.

This was round about the time that the 3.5 inch floppy came out, which was less "floppy". In South Africa we referred to them (innocently) as "stiffies" - something that never caught on in the rest of the world...

CIO : Your slideshow thingee sucks

[Foolicious]

I hate re-scrolling the browser after I click the 'next' or 'back' buttons for the slideshow.

Re:Oh, for Idol's sake!

[beav007]

Can't we go even one day on Slashdot without an Australian "story"?

Why don't you Aussie /. editors just launch slashdot.org.au and be done with it?

Oh, right, of course... Because you know that only Australians (if anybody) would give a shit about slashdot.org.au, and the whole point of spamming this Slashdot is so that Americans will "notice" you.

Wassamatter? 1 single story out of 20 per day for an international technology leader on an international technology site?

You could always go back to reading idle...

Ah, mammaries, I mean memories...

[BrokenHalo]

The only time my wife objects is when she stubs her toe on the old 029 card punch holding my study door open.

I used to use it with a Burroughs B3700 like this back in the '70s. Them were the days, when men were men, and small furry things with teeth were small furry...

Ah yes, as I was saying, get off my lawn. [snore]

Most of Europe and Asia

[Weaselmancer]

...about 70 years ago.