To all with interest in IBM 7090

Rubbish! Simulators are nowhere near enough to see what using a machine was really like. In any case, most people (other than me) could run the simulators at home, so there's no need for a museum to show them. Simulators amy or may not include all the bugs and quirks of the real machine. In gernaral the only way to find these is to run the real machine and compare the behaviour of the simulator under certain test cases. Simulators do not give the 'experienece' of the real machine (you don't ahve to go and sort the deck of cards you dropped, you don't have to put up with the clatter of an ASR33). And when it comes to investigatign the hardware, no simuulator comes close. I would certainly feel cheated if I visited a so-called operational computer museum and found everything was simulated, Except with the best will in thwe world it is not going to last 1000 years, or even 100 years. However you store it, parts will have degraded before then. I really feel you are better of doing what you can with it _now_ and recording all the information you can about it, while said information can be obtained. Case in point (not computer related). I have a device here which uses a train of plastic gears to drive one of the rotating parts. When I was running it, one of the gears litterally crumbed to dust. Not due to some other part seizing up, just because it was old plastic. Fortunately I had already counted and written down the numebr of teeth on all the gears (this informatiaon is not in the service manual, which simply says it's part <foo>) Of coruse I could then calcualte the diametircal pitch of the gear it meshed with and thus get a suitagble repalcement. A bit of machining to mke a hub to carry thsi gear and it was running again. Now, you might say that if I'd never run it, that gear would be still be good. Mayeb, But he repains were so weak and brittle that IMHO it would have fallen apart sitting on the shelf. And if I hadn't been investigating it, and hadn't counted the teeth, it would have been next-to-impossible to repair. -tony