On Tue, 22 Aug 2000, Mark Tapley wrote:
Admittedly the choice of "do not touch"
signs is a bit off-putting,
but honestly if my collection were on shelves with hundreds of people
walking by every hour, I'd have it behind glass. I love the idea of
I wouldn't. I'd have them turne on to the extent possible and allow
people to experiment with them with whatever software was available. A
lot of those machines are very common, and can stand to have a few
thousand people a year tap their keys. It's not like they would be
getting any use that's excessively more than they would had they continued
to be used by a single user.
teaching somebody to use my Rainbow, but *only* if I
can spend the time to
teach them to turn on *both* of the kludged power switches (two SPST
replacing a single DPST) at the *same time*, always put the lower floppy
into the RX-50 *upside down*, etc. A working, hands-on museum is of course
the ideal but in a situation where the guest-to-curator ratio is above
about 5, it entails a very high risk of damage to the collection.
I an see your point if you have limited resources, but I'm sure a lot of
the machines these guys have stream through many times over in a month.
Sellam International Man of Intrigue and Danger
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