*** Ideas needed for developing interactive displays....

On Mon, 2004-09-06 at 21:03 -0700, ed sharpe wrote: Well we've got a punched card machine, comptometers, and the 11/34 hooked up to a tape punch which people can use. Plus (nearly) all the 8 bit machines run at weekends for people to use, along with a good portion of the larger iron. (suprisingly, my fears when I first started there that the machines would get hammered into oblivion has been unfounded; the public actually take great care with them) We've got the Domesday setup running (usually, I'm having a bit of a reorganise at the mo so it's in bits) which is always popular, plus we've got a nixie tube counter hooked up to the doorway to count visitors and people love staring at that :-) If space ever permits I still plan to put up a large 'image wall' driven by 80's technology. I was also pondering having a hard disk with a perspex lid coupled to a display and keypad so that people can make it seek (along with some sort of "anatomy of a hard disk" info) And if we ever get our big plotter going, there's code around to convert a raster image to a plot - hooked up to a video camera we could produce huge plots of people for a fee (until we run out of plotter paper :) We've also got a couple of 11/84's coming in with a huge radar display attached, I'm sure we can do something interactive with that. (plus there's mini-projects in the pipeline like getting the weather satellite receiver and teletext unit working with the Acorn BBC so that people can play with those...) Of course the usual problem is lack of space. We badly need different premises that have more room. Unfortunately the government here doesn't give a damn about heritage/history and so they won't make any money or premises available. If anyone knows of a large empty building in the centre of the UK that we can just have, let me know :-) cheers, Jules