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Welcome to the Goodwill Computer Museum (Video)
Goodwill Industries rehabs computers and sells computer parts, at least in Austin, Texas. The Goodwill Computer Museum is a natural outgrowth of that effort. In this video, museum curator Lisa Worley takes Slashdot's Timothy Lord on a tour of the museum. Remember that TRS-80 you threw away in 1982? Well, they saved several of them to stimulate your nostalgia-based pleasure nodules. Ditto many other devices both common and rare, including a pre-Dell computer made and signed by Texas computer celebrity Michael Dell. So sit back and enjoy the ride, as Timothy does the walking and Lisa does the talking, kind of like Night at the Museum -- but without CGI dinosaurs and other life forms getting between you and the classic computers.
http://www.goodwillcomputermuseum.org/ Hours Monday – Saturday: 10am to 8pm Sunday: 11am to 6pm Free Admission 1015 Norwood Park Blvd Austin TX 78753 Contact the Museum: P: 512-637-7539 E: museum@austingoodwill.org How about a Slashdot group field trip/meetup there?
...my living room, years ago, though with more space between artifacts...
Anyone need a peek/poke ISA card for bit-wise operations?
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
The pre-video ad was like 3 hours long so I gave up.
There are 0x40000000 types of people: those who understand 32-bit IEEE 754 floating point, and those who don't.
Yes, but I think it was closer to 2002 when I finally did. I usually try to purge accumulated computer stuff every 10 years, give or take. With the exception of a Pentium Pro, I don't have anything older than a P2. But it's going to be time to clean house again soon. Every time I throw something away that isn't at least 10 years old, I end up needing it two weeks after it's gone. Then I have to pay a stupid amount of money to replace something that I had all along.
We were arguing the relative merits of the various computer platforms back in the day (Apple, TRS-80, Commodore, etc) and it struck me we're still doing it today. Why do we get married to these platforms and defend them so vigorously.
As a work-related volunteer event, we went and tore apart computers behind this shop. It's a decent operation, pairing a history of computing with (ostensibly) discount computer part shopping. The volunteer event was deconstructing the donated machines into component parts, and it was a hell of a fun day.
It's amazing how much crap ends up in computers, over time. I think, at one point, a live dog jumped out of one, spontaneously born from the quantity of dog hair.
No, but I could use an 8-bit ISA CGA video card and a CGA monitor if you have one. :-)
Lol funny you would ask that. I don't just remember it, my wife actually just found it while cleaning out the storage area in the crawlspace by the roof. First she saw the cartirdiges and thought it was an old Atari, then she saw the "Atari" and got very confused that it had a keyboard built in... and a tape deck..... :)
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Fuck you, Dice.
My co worker that doesn't block your shit ads says he got a full page ad requiring him to click through it to get to the site. Is this true?! WTF?
I have a:
TRS-80 model III
2 Commodore 64s
Mac SE/30
I'm proud of my little collection. I wish I could find a PET.
I'd love to take a walk through that warehouse they have.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
was that 30 sec. full page ad I just got?!?
They re-arrange it, add info and machines all the time. For awhile they had a Famicom and some games under glass and such. It's pretty neat. It's attached to the Computer Store, which I visit often to buy cheap classic xboxes to soft mod, and cheap game software, etc. Always a good time sink.
I'm pretty sure they don't want to encourage us to dump all our old computer garbage off at Goodwill. While some of this stuff may have some historical value, I seriously doubt they would appreciate me dumping about 30 old 486's and Pentiums (and associated old videocards) in the nearest Goodwill box.
The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
I visited there last year when I was in Austin for Formula 1. We happened to stumble upon the location as it's located in a strip mall right next to a Wal-Mart. The museum is pretty cool and has some neat stuff. If you are in the area it's definitely worth a look. There is also a great Goodwill computer store right next door with parts for older stuff (Mostly Dell, of course).
Work smarter, not harder.
Would be nice to have html5 video as well as flash. Sadly I could not download the ooyala video stream either.
Randomly, I was just there yesterday on a trip to Austin. Glad you're getting the word out, no one knows about this place. It was a cute little display with a few surprising pieces.
Correction: Required him to wait 30 seconds and not a click-through. Took him right to the slashdot main page after waiting. Malware wouldn't have done this.
I sure as hell am not going to turn off my ad-blocker to check.
It's ironic somehow that the web we want has no advertisements, yet the major source of revenue of most sites is advertisements.
Although I don't really see how me not seeing an advertisement for a product I don't want helps the advertisers. Am I just saving them page loads and therefor not wasting any of their resources? If the end result of an advertisement that I do see is me just ignoring it because it is an advertisement, why should it matter so much that I saw said advertisement?
I do have a little check box up near the top of my screen though that asks if I want ads disabled, that is a privilege /. has given me it says for positive contributions, I have no idea if that is common or not, but I like it. It's a nice little admission that without our comments this site would not exist, but still without advertisements a lot of sites many of us use would not be able to keep their lights on.
I do wonder why advertisers haven't learned from the most successful advertising company in the world to keep their ads nice and simple and out of the way. People are not there to look at your advertisement, they are there to look at the content, keep advertisements and content separate, at no point should your advertisement interfere with accessing content. If advertisers would just follow those simple basic rules I might someday turn off my ad blocker, till then I like the way I'm seeing the web right now.
Oh and just an FYI, if you have not created an account one reason to is that you can view /. in classic mode, I really dislike the default UI.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
Had them, but not anymore. Actually I had a weird ATI video card that could do the full color palette at the same time in text-mode, and could also do a full color palette in a CGA-type resolution, but could only do a four-color palette in an EGA resolution. It was odd...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
My basement until my wife finally won the argument.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
Somebody should tell them about computers.
....has [what looks like] a really fun job.
I used some of this stuff years ago. I noticed that most of this stuff is PC based hardware (as you would expect). Too bad some other stuff (old Atari/Amiga/Timex) hardware isn't there, or any larger scale stuff (I remember old 24 processor Silicon Graphics Hardware, DEC hardware (except for the PDP8 which the video showed), and multicore machines running OS/2). I also remember HP3000 and HP8000 based systems. I realise that people don't normally give that kind of thing to Goodwill, but they mentioned people donating old computer hardware directly to the museum.
I've got a "PCs Limited" Turbo XT in my storage room, that I bought the same year Michael Dell and I finished college. But it was upgraded and overhauled so much by the time I replaced it* that little more than the case and the power supply could possibly bear Michael Dell's finger prints.
*It was a 16MHz 386 with an 8-bit ISA VGA card and a 60MB hard drive.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
My basement until my wife finally won the argument.
My basement today. I'll sure miss my wife.
They keep old classic minis in working order. Want to see a DEC 20 in operation?
While spending tons of money on national commercials they have the balls to charge you 35lb shipping on their auction website, but when you go to a store all they have is miles of out of date ragged clothing, 50 George Forman grills, and some shitty ass alarm clocks
they go out of their way to seperate products from accessories, charging near ebay prices for near garbage all tossed in a cement mixer with the trademark goodwill brown funk.
If there is a deal to be had in there, its a god damed rarity, and I used to visit 3 of them once a week, its not even worth bothering to show up.
And who do you help? the 19 year old asshat wearing 200$ shoes and sporting a 100$ haircut that treats your donations like garbage, infact seeing them toss it in the garbage on more than one occasion. Goodwill? fuck that noise
The old museum at the old location on Ohlen was better since none of the machines were under glass. And the prices were better too. Now it's same old stock that's been there for 6-12 months.
Heh. Yeah, I had hoarded computer stuff and already gotten rid of a fair amount of it before I met my wife. As we consolidated households I got rid of quite a bit more, and now I get rid of stuff as it enters the, "not useful to me anymore" phase. So, most SCSI and firewire cables, most flat-ribbon IDE cables, that sort of thing, gone. Most serial and parallel, gone. No reason to keep that stuff anymore, if I need it I can find plenty of it for a few cents at the thrift stores.
And you know what? I'm happier for it. I have more room for current projects, when I do need something it doesn't take me very long to find it, and I am not constantly rearranging junk.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Yeah, mine's mostly floppy these days, too. - tai game ban ga
But rearranging the junk was half the fun ....
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
Seriously, Slashdot? A 2+ minute IBM commercial that can't be skipped to watch this video?