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I have been thinking about this question the last couple of days, and I just want to share a slightly different point of view. I teach Computer Science at a University, and being a pack rat of long standing, convinced our then chairman to let me start a "computer museum" so I could clean out my garage, closets, attic, study, etc. In this environment there is merit in older machines, even if they don't run. One of my favorite items, and one that gets the attention of the students, is a voice coil magnet out of an unknown drive. It weighs about 60 pounds, IIRC. (http://www.cse.uta.edu/TheMuseum at CSE/Whazat.html) I tell them that it was in a drive about the size of a washing machine and that held no more than 100 MB & probably much less. Then I contrast that with a 2.5 inch drive that holds perhaps 10s of GBs and weighs only a few ounces, certainly runs faster and costs less than whatever drive the magnet came out of - heck, probably less than the magnet! Similarly I have a magnetic core plane that gives new meaning to the terms "core dump" and "non-volatile memory" for these students and a tube circuit out of a IBM 709 (or 704 - not sure which) which I show with a copy of an IBM adv. that talks about such tube circuits and the machines that incorporated them. If I had a 709 here there is no way I could run it for even 10 minutes. No power (don't even know what kind), no A.C., no raised floor, ... . Does that mean that it is unreasonable to want to have such a machine here? I would love it. I might only be able to display a part of it at a time, but it would be very educational to compare it to cell phones which certainly have more power, etc. So for me, bigger is better. The more stuff I have, the more I can help give perspective to the visitors who have no comprehension of what it means to say that disk drive technology has improved something like 6 orders of magnitude since they were introduced. I am collecting lots of stuff. I don't have time to turn them all on and mess around with them (though I would love to.) I think it is important to archive this stuff before it goes away and work on finding means to insure the continuance of the collection. Gil A. G. (Gil) Carrick, Director The Museum at CSE University of Texas at Arlington Department of Computer Science & Engineering Box 19015, 471 S Cooper Street Arlington, TX 76019 817-272-3620 http://www.cse.uta.edu/TheMuseum at CSE/