14 May
2014
14 May
'14
1:44 p.m.
On 14/05/2014 21:27, Tony Duell wrote:
Certainly many UK museusm do have a 'black hole
policy' as you put it.
And this is one reason (the main reason) why I will not donate anything
to a museum.
I would rather my machines get used and enjoyed than sit i na museum
store soemwhere.
Incidentaly, my expeirence suggests that msueums have a similar policy
with information. I have never had a useful reply to a quesiton from _any_
UK museum (not jsut comptuer ones). Perhaps I've been unlucky, but I find
private colelctors a lot more helpful.
-tony Tony,
That i s odd because I have generally had helpful replies from all the
people I have contacted, at MOSI, The Science Museum and The National
Museum of Computing in the UK and Al at CHM. Al has been especially help
full and re-scanned documents with missing pages, and helped me search
the software archives.
One great thing about MOSI is that any one can visit the MOSI
collections centre and view any of the objects in on-site storage. They
were quite happy to show me the PDP-8 archives they have (sorry for the
long URL) which are briefly descried here:-
http://emu.msim.org.uk/htmlmn/collections/online/archivedisplay.php?irn=331…
which are badly catalogued. I guess I have now created a job for myself
Cataloguing these......
If Al K is still talking to me I will go and check what is there and
make sure there is nothing unique. If there is anything unique I will
try and get it scanned or converted to machine readable format and sent
to Al so it can be made publicly available. This might be challenging....
Dave
And just to make it clear, the Computer History
Museum has a policy that
NOTHING offered or in our
collection is EVER sold.
That means? Everything that ever arrives at CHM will
never leave again?
I personally do not like "black hole policies". They mean that the CHM
wouldn't even help out a collector like me with a spare part it would
never need again...