Thanks Eric for your thoughful comments. In particular I appreciate your
willingness to give the History Center a chance. I think this thread has
been fruitful in re-establishing our connections to the collecting
community at large and I have received numerous positive comments from
individuals on the list wishing to get involved in our activities as well.
I am hopeful this can be a fresh start for all of us to bootstrap computer
history even further and share information (and war stories!) about our
fascinating hobby. The Center is placing quite a few of its video archives
on-line as digital media streams in the weeks ahead and I will let the list
know when they become available.
Also, we put out our quarterly on-line newsletter today at:
http://www.computerhistory.org/events/core/1.1/ If anyone on the list
wishes to be added to our regular (low traffic) mailing list, please just
drop me a line.
Thanks again for getting in tuoch!
Dag.
At 02:09 AM 11/25/99 -0000, Eric Smith wrote:
Megan wrote:
I would suggest that the move from boston cannot
expect to have
reduced any ill feeling but increased it...
I can understand that those who live on the east coast may feel
slighted by this, but when you consider that the PURPOSE of the move
was to get the collection into a place where it could actually be
maintained in a reasonable manner, surely you'd have to concede that
to be better than letting it languish (and possibly meet a much more
horrible fate) in Boston.
It will obviously take some time for TCMHC to win the trust of those
who felt betrayed by the actions of TCM. But in all fairness I think
that their intentions are better judged by their recent actions than
those taken by TCM years ago. TCMHC seems genuinely concerned about
preserving the historical record, and educating people about computer
history, rather than simply acting as a thinly veiled outlet for Intel
advertising. This is, for instance, demonstrated by such things as their
IBM 1620 restoration project. There is a lot of interest in restoring
other systems as well, but there aren't enough resources to do multiple
systems at once.
--
Dag Spicer
Curator & Manager of Historical Collections
Editorial Board, IEEE Annals of the History of Computing
The Computer Museum History Center
Building T12-A
NASA Ames Research Center
Mountain View, CA 94035
Tel: +1 650 604 2578
Fax: +1 650 604 2594
E-m: spicer(a)computerhistory.org
WWW:
http://www.computerhistory.org
<spicer(a)computerhistory.org> PGP: 15E31235 (E6ECDF74 349D1667 260759AD
7D04C178)
S/V 516T
Read about The Computer Museum History Center in the
November issue of WIRED magazine! See "The Computer
Hall of Fame - Modern Art." pp. 276 - 299.