16 Oct
2010
16 Oct
'10
1:36 p.m.
My experience
suggests that few museums would dismantle a rare machine to
produce documetnation and then fix it, whereas quite a few enthusiasts
would. Giving a very rarew machine to such an enthusiast is more likely
to produce inforamtion of benefit to the rest of the classic computing
community than would be produced if it was given to a museum.
-tony
I don't understand that logic. What you want is a collector that will tinker
with an item and modify it so he can print "hello world" on the screen or
printer a few times until he gets bored with it, blows
it up and cannot fix
it, or dies and it gets trashed. A museum will collect all the information
Why do you assume that enthusiasts are going to blow things up, or be
unable to fix them?
about that rare device and keep it intact until some
later generation has
the need or desire to see what made it tick. The key difference is each time
There are several problems with this :
1) The information my not exist, at least not publically. If you need to
reverse-engineer a scheamtic, it's a lot easier to do so from a machine
that's basically working.
2) ICs fail even if they are not powered up. We all know about bit-rot in
EPROMs, but other ICs fail in storage too. It may well be that a machine,
however carefulkly it has been stored, will not be available to later
genarations.
that rarity passes hands to another collector things
get lost and you have
Why? If the 2 collectors involved know what they are doing, then nothing
will be lost.
-tony