Housing collections

In article <43B31304.3030607 at oldskool.org>, Jim Leonard <trixter at oldskool.org> writes: g I agree, I just never had "hands on" experience with things like punch cards, paper tape. I had a little bit of experience with 9-track tape. I think having "hands on" experiences in a museum is important to keep people interested. However, I note that most museums do not have any hands-on component. The best hands-on museum I've ever seen is the Exploratorium, which is 100% hands-on. I think that there are things you can do in this vein that allow people (kids particularly) to explore the elements of digital computing without sacrificing collectible machines. When it comes to things like mainframes and largish minicomputers they often need a room where the computing is stored due to climate control and dirt reasons, while the actual "interaction" is done semi-remotely by terminal. Even for things like SGI graphics workstations, you can put the workstation in a computer room and the display/keyboard/mouse in another room (many older workstations are pretty damn noisy!). Then there are things like C=64s and VIC-20s which you can just "sacrifice" to the crowd knowing that you can always pick up another one for repairs. In that scenario I think the most fragile thing would be media, but if you replace the floppy drives with faked interfaces into IDE/PC storage behind the scenes, then that concern fades away as well. I think it would also be helpful to have machines that you can tinker with in the sens of taking out boards and seeing the chips and so-on. These would be machines that you have no intention of ever making functional (in fact, the boards could be dead boards housed in a typical card cage), purely there for the purpose of getting your hands on them. -- "The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline"-- code samples, sample chapter, FAQ: <http://www.xmission.com/~legalize/book/> Pilgrimage: Utah's annual demoparty <http://pilgrimage.scene.org>