7 Aug
2012
7 Aug
'12
11:20 a.m.
In article <alpine.DEB.2.00.1208071102560.22744 at brioche.invalid.domain>,
Tothwolf <tothwolf at concentric.net> writes:
I have a policy now of /not/ donating computer-related
items to any sort
of museum simply because of this.
Not all museums are the same. For instance, Living Computer Museum
and my Computer Graphics Museum have a very different sort of mission
than that of the Computer History Museum. The CHM is attempting to
preserve artifacts into the distant future. The LCM and CGM are
attempting to create living exhibits with working hardware. The two
missions are complimentary and neither one is "right" or "wrong".
The Smithsonian doesn't let the general public touch stuff in their
exhibits, while the Exploratorium explicitly encourages you to touch
and interact with the stuff in their exhibits. They both serve
different needs as museums.
I personally own a number of examples of
"rare" and historically
significant computing technology. Two such examples are a SGI IRIS 1400
[Computer Chronicles, Computer Graphics, 4/5/1984
http://archive.org/details/Computer1984_6
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmO0y51_y9o] and a complete Motorola Altair
wireless network system.
I'd love to have an IRIS 1400 for the Computer Graphics Museum. For
one-off items like that, my plan is that there would be periodic
public demonstrations of it in operation, sort of like what the CHM
does with it's PDP-1.
For more common items like SGI Octanes, the plan is to create an
exhibit where people use the actual hardware themselves. All my
currently planned exhibits revolve around some sort of digital content
creation (image, animation, 3D model, etc.) which are shared back to
the Youtube/Facebook/Flickr/etc. social media accounts of visitors
should they wish to share. Otherwise, everything created goes into a
library of content created by visitors using that exhibit.
While there are quite a number of IRIS 2000 and IRIS
3000 series systems
out there, and as much as I detest using the word "rare" due to widespread
overuse, the IRIS 1400 is about as rare as hen's teeth and there are very
few examples of these machines left today. My own 1400, serial # 95
(originally serial # 47), was located in the UK from about 1983 to 1998
and was originally used as part of a DC-10 flight simulator.
I have an IRIS 3100 and in about 10 years of collecting, that's the
only 1st generation IRIS model I've been able to find.
--
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