Attack of the IT monuments men: Museum wants your kit

We grow old too

Technology generally ages fast, people tend to think that they don't. A few years ago a friend of mine was appalled to find her gym-slip marked with her name-tag as an exhibit at the Museum of Childhood at Sudbury Hall, then she realized that it was over 50 years old.

I have a great footstool

Chaps,

my brother-in-law started developing computer games in his teens, he recently returned from the sunshine state to sort out some oddments in the loft of his mums house.

Amidst the old floppies etc was a hard drive which he used to develop his first commercial game on (40mb 5 1/4 inch Seagate), including the case, psu and adaptor card it is 2 x 12 x 18 inches.

It makes for an excellent footstool under my desk, also when younger relatives and friends pop around and ask what it is, their reaction when I tell them is a sight to behold...

Cheers,

J

I bet they don't want any of mine

Which is a shame because it's all in really good almost working condition with not too much rust and not too many dents in the side and still almost beige and only produced in exclusive limited production runs of a couple of million units at a time.

Yes, I still delude myself that someone somewhere might want some of it for spare parts when really I should face up to the fact that it needs to go on to the WEEE pile at the local tip, and that I will have no choice but to do proper penance for heartlessly evicting those poor resident spiders that just look so happy in their homes.

Probably not feasible to pop over

but I think it would be interesting to hear this talk, and exchange ideas.

We (Computermuseum Arnhem, the Netherlands) have got a fair pile of gear starting with 1930-ish Telexes, via 1950-ish papertape-driven typewriters (MailMerge avant la lettre), the first ever programmable desktop calculator (1963), two Z80-based machines from a local manufacturer who's only ever built 200 of them before going titsup, and then of course the more common CP/M, early homecomputer, PDP and VAX stuff and 1980's workstations and Apple kit from that era.

People are generally happy to see the computers from their youth and ones they worked on early in their career preserved, but it more or less stops there. And we're in a catch-22 situation: we're not big and accessible enough to really attract visitors, and because of that, even if we were to charge an entrance fee, it wouldn't be enough by far to be able to afford a better location, with more exhibition space, and better repair and storage facilities. We also don't really have the manpower at the moment to actually run the museum as a museum; it's open when we're there anyway, usually busy fixing machines. And there's just four of us. Occasionally we get offers for help, but so far none have turned out to have hands for digging through the pile of What's This Then And What Is It For?

Finding kit isn't that hard, in our experience. Once you've assembled a critical mass new (old) kit accretes around it. The biggest problem is finding documentation, software and knowledge about the stuff. In that respect we've been lucky to have been offered (and taken) a cellar full of 1980-ish kit with boxes full of docs and media. Usually the gear goes into the computer room, the docs end up in the sysadmin pen or the developer's department, and they rarely get reunited at decommissioning time.

There are other collections and computer musea over here, but for all that I know of you need to arrange a visit. Most are private collections in someone's loft or cellar. One proper, accessible, computer museum has closed from lack of funding, another is facing getting the raised floor pulled out from underneath them because the building they're in is to be sold.

So, essentially, we're interested in finding a way forward. Preferably without getting tangled in subsidies which can be cut or revoked.