22 Mar
1999
22 Mar
'99
5:06 p.m.
On Mon, 22 Mar 1999, Max Eskin wrote:
That's entirely correct, if you targeted your audience to be the general
public. But computer museums definitely have a certain group of people
who are interested in their exhibits--namely programmers--and these people
should have free access to the machines in the collection.
That's where a live human comes in. To explain to the interested but
untrained observer what it is they are looking at, why it is significant,
and what it could do. The problem is finding such people to man the
exhibits.
Sellam Alternate e-mail: dastar(a)siconic.com
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If you keep a
complete backup of the hard disk (something that's a good
idea anyway), and possibly substitute the keyboard (if spares for it are
impossible to obtain), then there's little that can be damaged from
people using the machine. And an unoriginal keyboard is a lot better than
an unoriginal CPU
Yes, that's true. But how would the people use such a machine anyway? I
mean, if you put on a card some instructions, people will just type them
in not understanding the reasons for them, and not get any joy from it.
This is especially true for machines that don't use keyboards and
screens. Let's say we took a DEC running OS/8 and let people use it. What
would they do with it? They might type DIR, say "Oh, it's like DOS" and
walk way. Are you sure
about that. Some people are certainly interested in seeing
how things (computers, steam engines, machine tools, etc) were used. I've
been to plenty of interesting museums where many exhibits consist of
somebody demonstrating something.
Yes, but for a computer there's nothing to watch besides blinking lights.
For a steam engine, you see someone poke firewood, the wheel spinning,
smoke coming out, etc.