16 Oct
2010
16 Oct
'10
4:21 p.m.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Tony Duell" <ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk>
To: <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
Sent: Saturday, October 16, 2010 4:36 PM
Subject: Re: Xerox Alto on ebay (not mine!)
Whre did I say anything about modifying it?
I just think you are thinking very short term, like 20-50 years not in the
very long term 100+ years where museums are involved. Later generations will
not care about specific machines (unless it was something revolutionarily
special) just in generic how did this thing work. Sooner or later just
turning on old relics will release the magic smoke and parts plus expertise
in repairing them will be hard to come by. For the most part I expect old
systems to be run via emulator so that any software and its data can be read
for whatever reason, the original hardware at that point is not important
(unless the emulator has a bug or old media needs to be reloaded).
All you need is one collector to lose their job for everything they have to
hit the trash heap. Just by having to move a few times you will end up
losing items or getting them destroyed. Museums probably have a better setup
in case of fire. A museum located in a static location is better long term
then items going from collectors to collectors.
My experience suggests that few museums would
dismantle a rare machine
to
produce documetnation and then fix it, whereas quite a few enthusiasts
would. Giving a very rarew machine to such an enthusiast is more likely
to produce inforamtion of benefit to the rest of the classic computing
community than would be produced if it was given to a museum.
-tony
I don't understand that logic. What you want is a collector that will
tinker
with an item and modify it so he can print "hello world" on the screen or
printer a few times until he gets bored with it,
blows it up and cannot
fix
it, or dies and it gets trashed. A museum will collect all the
information
Why do you assume that enthusiasts are going to blow things up, or be
unable to fix them?
about that rare device and keep it intact until
some later generation has
the need or desire to see what made it tick. The key difference is each
time
There are several problems with this :
1) The information my not exist, at least not publically. If you need to
reverse-engineer a scheamtic, it's a lot easier to do so from a machine
that's basically working.
2) ICs fail even if they are not powered up. We all know about bit-rot in
EPROMs, but other ICs fail in storage too. It may well be that a machine,
however carefulkly it has been stored, will not be available to later
genarations.
that rarity passes hands to another collector
things get lost and you
have
Why? If the 2 collectors involved know what they are doing, then nothing
will be lost.
-tony