22 Aug
2000
22 Aug
'00
3:53 a.m.
Are you sure that's safe? Not just for the machine, but also for the
public. It only takes one idiot to break a computer, but an idiot could
bankrupt you just by doing something unfathomably stupid like connecting
himself to the mains through your display.
Don't you think you've got a responsibility to protect your entire
collection by preventing the idiot from having you closed down just by
killing himself with his own stupidity, for which the courts will surely
blame you?
Dick
----- Original Message -----
From: Sellam Ismail <foo(a)siconic.com>
To: <classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org>
Sent: Tuesday, August 22, 2000 8:09 AM
Subject: Re: Goodwill Computerworks Museum is open
Danger
On Tue, 22 Aug 2000, Mark Tapley wrote:
to
Admittedly the choice of "do not touch"
signs is a bit off-putting,
but honestly if my collection were on shelves with hundreds of people
walking by every hour, I'd have it behind glass. I love the idea of
I wouldn't. I'd have them turne on to the extent possible and allow
people to experiment with them with whatever software was available. A
lot of those machines are very common, and can stand to have a few
thousand people a year tap their keys. It's not like they would be
getting any use that's excessively more than they would had they continued
to be used by a single user.
> teaching somebody to use my Rainbow, but *only* if I can spend the time > teach them to turn on *both* of the kludged power
switches (two SPST
> replacing a single DPST) at the *same time*, always put the lower floppy
> into the RX-50 *upside down*, etc. A working, hands-on museum is of
course
the ideal but
in a situation where the guest-to-curator ratio is above
about 5, it entails a very high risk of damage to the collection.
I an see your point if you have limited resources, but I'm sure a lot of
the machines these guys have stream through many times over in a month.
Sellam International Man of Intrigue and
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Looking for a six in a pile of nines...
VCF 4.0 is September 30-October 1
San Jose Convention Center, San Jose, California
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