15 Oct
2010
15 Oct
'10
3:13 p.m.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Tony Duell" <ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk>
To: <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
Sent: Friday, October 15, 2010 4:02 PM
Subject: Re: Xerox Alto on ebay (not mine!)
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
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
that rarity passes hands to another collector things get lost and you have
the possibility of it getting destroyed, a decent museum will keep it from
rotting so that generations from now somebody can go back and learn from it
(using high tech science to see its layers without trashing it).
Computers are not that old, let a few sit broken for a thousand years until
a society has the desire to see how they did it back in the stone ages.
Hopefully by that time they can just replicate the broken parts like in star
trek and leave the rusting hulk as is for the next 1000 years.