Boston CM (was Re: Computer Museum of America ...

I've been to the Boston Computer Museum many many times At one point I contacted the Curator to see if the museum would be interested in displaying some of the restored machines that several local collectors had at the time. The very notion of computer restoration struck the Museum as insane, and they wanted nothing to do with such displays, nor even hosting meetings of collectors and restoration fans. One person even had a PDP 10, and really needed some space to set the thing up. I was going to put a MIT CADR on display, and perhaps my 1968 HP 2114, etc. The Museums response was that unless we were crossing their palms with money, they wanted nothing to do with us, it was all about donations. It was not too long after this that I began to think vintage computer collecting was some sort of deviant behavior or something, and I became much less active (despite having a oversized 2 car garage to fill!). Not until many years later did I learn of the VCF events, and I joined the list. During that time, the PDP-10 my friend had was lost to scrappers because he had no space to store it, and many other cool machines were lost as well. There have also been rumors of very nice machines being donated to the B.C.M only to be locked away, unrestored, and worse, sold off as scrap to feed the cash hungry so-called museum. Basically, the B.C.M was a social club for a select crowd, and its primary function was never to preserve and display computing history. John Allain wrote: