Dell "Oldest PC" winner on zdnet

Well, I didn't know that my original posting about the Dell winner would generate so many postings ;-) In spite of the pros/cons about the lawyer who turned over his Altair for a WinPC, one good thing (I think) that came out of this contest is publicity/awareness regarding the preservation of classics. Case in point is that when I got home last night and finally had a chance to read yesterday's local paper, in the business section there was an article about the Dell contest and the museum, including a photo of one of the curator (David Weil) trying to bring up a Commodore PET. While I wasn't surprised to hear about the contest & museum on the 'net, I was quite surprised to read about it in a local paper here in central North Carolina (right there next to the news about Red Hat). It was an Associated Press article, so it is bound to have appeared in other papers nationwide. FWIW, the article says that the museum has 200 "pieces", including a 360 mainframe, "the KIM Homebrew computer, a kit which sold for $25 ..." (I wonder if they dropped a zero), and a "Royal Precision Vacuum Tube Computer" - described as being built in 1963, with 113 vacuum tubes (sounds like a small number to me), drom memory, disk, & paper tape reader. The article also said there was some kind of storage disk from 1965 that was the size of a tractor-trailer tire, holding 2.5 Mbytes, and had to be sandblasted to be erased. (Huh???). Anyhow, this kind of awareness is a good thing, IMO. At 11:01 AM 8/21/99 -0700, Sellam wrote: Regards, Alex Calculator History & Technology Web Page http://aknight.home.mindspring.com/calc.htm