Rod Smallwood wrote:
Everybody saying 'not I' does not alter the
fact that a priceless piece of
computer history is at best missing and at worst destroyed.
The real point is that the computer museum people knew of its existence and
yet failed in their duty to recover and save it after the DECUS event.
Shame on you all!!
Museums can't save everything that is of historical interest, because
there are simply too many things that are of interest, and museums have
very limited budgets, staff, and space. It is also often not completely
clear which items are of historical interest until many years later.
It should be noted that although the Computer History Museum in Mountain
View is a spinoff of The Computer Museum in Boston, CHM is *entirely*
focused on the preservation of computer history, while TCM had multiple
objectives and preservation of computer history was not necessarily
their highest priority at all times. That is one of the factors that
led to the creation of CHM (originally The Computer Museum History Center).
All indications to date are that CHM has exercised the utmost diligence
in the stewardship of historical artifacts, and that this can be
expected to continue in the future.
Eric