No place that rips the guts out of classic machines and replaces them with Christmas tree lights should be allowed to call itself a museum. The Boston computer museum was a total joke. Derek Peschel wrote:

John Allain wrote Are you asking me or Bryan or Bob? Anyway, I first went about ten or fifteen years ago. I remember a magnificently huge keypunch, bits of old machines (Whirlwind, UNIVAC, etc.) with video clips, and a non- working PDP-1 graphics display. There were two joysticks too, so I guess it was set up for Spacewar, but I don't remember actually seeing the computer. I also remember an exhibit demonstrating one-dimensional cellular automata (though that might have been on another trip). My most recent trip was maybe five years ago and was very disappointing. Intel's "giant computer" exhibit didn't teach me anything and was somewhat of an advertisement for Intel products. The museum did have other exhibits that were more interactive (natural language understanding systems, etc.). They impressed me but I didn't feel I knew more than before about the essence of the subject. You guys have to see the collection in California. They have all the cool hardware that the BCM stopped exhibiting and they are pretty serious about presenting depth. -- Derek

I've been to the Boston Computer Museum many many times At one point I contacted the Curator to see if the museum would be interested in displaying some of the restored machines that several local collectors had at the time. The very notion of computer restoration struck the Museum as insane, and they wanted nothing to do with such displays, nor even hosting meetings of collectors and restoration fans. One person even had a PDP 10, and really needed some space to set the thing up. I was going to put a MIT CADR on display, and perhaps my 1968 HP 2114, etc. The Museums response was that unless we were crossing their palms with money, they wanted nothing to do with us, it was all about donations. It was not too long after this that I began to think vintage computer collecting was some sort of deviant behavior or something, and I became much less active (despite having a oversized 2 car garage to fill!). Not until many years later did I learn of the VCF events, and I joined the list. During that time, the PDP-10 my friend had was lost to scrappers because he had no space to store it, and many other cool machines were lost as well. There have also been rumors of very nice machines being donated to the B.C.M only to be locked away, unrestored, and worse, sold off as scrap to feed the cash hungry so-called museum. Basically, the B.C.M was a social club for a select crowd, and its primary function was never to preserve and display computing history. John Allain wrote:

On Wed, 6 Feb 2002, Hans Franke wrote: Dang, I forgot to even watch it! Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org * Old computing resources for business and academia at www.VintageTech.com *

If a snowstorm can get your Satelite down, then it was already flying _way_ to low. You should adjust the orbit to a higher altitude - it also reduces the trasportation costs, siche you don't need to bring up a new one two or three times a year, but it rather says for 5 and more years ! Serius, you realy must live way outside civilisation to go thru this effort to get TV ! SCNR Hans -- VCF Europa 3.0 am 27./28. April 2002 in Muenchen http://www.vcfe.org/

On Wed, 6 Feb 2002, Derek Peschel wrote: "Secrets, Lies, and Atomic Spies" was the name of the program. David Weil's message said they filmed some of their computers for the program, not that the program was ABOUT the Computer Museum of America. Note to all: read, comprehend, repeat if necessary. Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org * Old computing resources for business and academia at www.VintageTech.com *

--- Roger Merchberger <zmerch(a)30below.com> wrote: I'd appreciate VCD resolution at a minimum. Even a P100 (or CD-32 with MPEG cart) can play back a VCD mpeg. I do! I have an upgraded Apex AD600A (I had to update the firmware because mine had a bug - it couldn't play SVCD disks with the video file in the MPEG2 directory, only in the MPEGAV directory). My experience is that an SVCD MPEG (which is 480x480) runs about 50 min for an 800Mb file (which barely fits on an 80 min CD-R because it uses 2552(?)-byte sectors, not 2048 byte sectors. Looks nice, though. VCD (352x200) is about 500MB for the same length (about 10MB/minute). I'm game, but I have broadband (presuming you didn't want to burn disks). -ethan __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Great stuff seeking new owners in Yahoo! Auctions! http://auctions.yahoo.com

On Thu, 31 Jan 2002, The Wanderer wrote: Pretty please, NO avi. I'd hate to have to install Windows. Doc

On Thu, 31 Jan 2002, Dan Kolb wrote: Uh, not necessarily. .avi covers a whole world of sins. AVI is not a single format, and some aren't supported under MacOS or Linux. I dunno about *BSD. MPG is a lot more universal. OGG would be more politically correct. Doc

On Thu, 31 Jan 2002, Doc wrote: Since I'm a Linux geek, I'll recommend mplayer. It uses Windows CODEC's to play AVI's and MPG's (even DivX) on Linux. http://www.MPlayerHQ.hu/homepage/ -- Pat

Sellam Ismail wrote: Hmm. Following that link shows: "Secrets, Lies, and Atomic Spies "NOVA reveals startling new evidence that Soviet spies penetrated America's deepest secrets, including the Manhattan Project, in the 1940's. By cracking the code of Soviet diplomatic cables, the FBI was able to hunt down "atom spies" such as Klaus Fuchs and Julius Rosenberg. But the true "master spy," a physicist named Ted Hall, got away -- and his gripping story is presented for the first time by NOVA. "Original broadcast date: 2/5/2002 "Topics: biography, mathematics, technology/crime, technology/weapons and warfare" No mention of the museum. I'll watch anyway, of course. :-) Mike http://tarnover.org