Buying something from a museum (was Re: Whats in a straight 8 PDP-8)

The masses don't give a crap about how core memory works now nor will they in 200 years. The artifacts are important to researchers about how things were done in the past. Museums are for preservation of historical items intact and the museums that are still around show select items the masses would like just to get funding to keep the lights on and to snag new stuff. The real interesting stuff is in a back room waiting for somebody doing research to need to take a look at it or run a non destructive test on it. Egyptian mummies bring in quite a bit of money to museums when people come to look at them (well a select portion of what the museum has and not even the most interesting items just the flashy stuff). The medial people of their day 1800's would not have thought twice about cutting those mummies open and poking around ruining them for everyone else. But they kept some intact and a 100 years later there are tools to look at them inside out without disturbing them for later generations. I expect computers from the future will either not exist at all (collapse of society) or will be quite different from what we have today (whole systems in one small chip that runs off body heat and interface directly to your brain maybe). Researchers will be able to scan those old massively huge chips and see what's going on at the atomic layer and create a simulator to run the system. BIOS dumps and software code (even just printouts or examples) will be enough to make sure they have the thing emulated correctly. Nobody is really going to want to run VisiCalc on a real Apple II 200 years from now, they just want to know what tools were used that allowed humans to get to the moon a few decades after they figured out how to get off the ground and fly without crashing. Museums are great for preserving the old analog computers (used for making designs in carpets, targeting the guns of a battleship, etc.) that can be simple or very complex but easy to preserve. -----Original Message----- From: Mouse Sent: Thursday, May 15, 2014 10:25 PM To: cctalk at classiccmp.org Subject: Re: Buying something from a museum (was Re: Whats in a straight 8 PDP-8) But if their attitude towards those who want to see them is the same in 500 years as it is now - and I see no reason to think it won't be - then how much point is, really, there in that preservation? /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B --- This email is free from viruses and malware because avast! Antivirus protection is active. http://www.avast.com