I'd like to announce the Computer History Wiki at
http://toresbe.dreamhosters.com/wiki !
I realize that there has been some discussion previously about setting
up a computer history wiki, and that Jay has decided against hosting one
himself, favouring a knowledge base arrangement.
I am involved in the Norwegian Computer History Society, and we have a
MediaWiki website which we are very happy with. However, being a
Norwegian organization, the page is... well, it's in Norwegian. I found
myself really enjoying adding technical information, guides, etc, but I
was very frustrated by the fact that the text would only reach a very
limited audience, and only had a very limited potential for revision by
others - at most, our audience consisted of Scandinavia.
Recently I bought a very cheap hosting deal from Dreamhost, which so far
has worked splendidly. I therefore decided to use this to set up an
English computer history wiki and gauge the response. So far, this has
been very encouraging - we are up to 80 articles now, and it's growing
very fast.
The chief difference between this wiki and Wikipedia is that this is not
aiming to be an encyclopedia of formal defintion articles, but an
information base for articles of all kinds - handy hints and tips,
practical guides, tutorials, quick introductions, cheat sheets, advice,
stories, you name it.
My hope is that this page could become a resource for people on all ends
of the classiccmp knowledge scale. The wiki is currently hosted on a
temporary domain, since I did not want to spend my free domain (included
in the hosting deal) if interest turned out to be minimal. Well, it
hasn't, and I'm seriously considering registering a domain very soon.
Currently, the wiki has a strong DEC minicomputer bias, because all
three of the current active editors are DEC fans. With time, I hope this
bias becomes less apparent, and that people will add information about
micros, other minis, mainframes, peripherals, terminals, etc, etc.
Again, the URL of the wiki is:
http://toresbe.dreamhosters.com/wiki
Regards,
Tore Sinding Bekkedal