Museums as home for ccmp (Was Whats in a straight 8, PDP-8) - test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

14 May 2014

On 5/14/14, 1:27 AM, Toby wrote:
...
  On 13/05/14 12:58 PM, John Wilson wrote:
  >On Tue, May 13, 2014 at 10:53:47AM +0200,
Pontus Pihlgren wrote:
> >>At the very least, one musuem I talked to doesn't want to give away
> >>things willy-nilly because it might scare away donators of objects. I
> >>suppose many donators give to museums because they know the object ends
> >>up in good hands, not to someone who will turn around and sell it for
> >>profit.
 >
 >Glad to hear it.  I once gave away a KL10 and I honestly have no idea
 >what the #@!(*#&%(* they did with it (it wasn't around long).  Now I'm
 >very leery of thinking anyone's a better home for my stuff than I am,
 >no matter what their credentials.
 >  Agreed. I went through the accession process with a Lisa with a major
 museum but by the end of it I was so dissatisfied with their assurances
 it wouldn't just sit in a basement or be disposed of that I decided it
 had a better future with me. 
I am a little less willing to donate to museums these days.

I donated some documents to a museum.  A few years later, I did a 
catalog search and the documents did not come up.  A year after that I 
started asking about accessing one of the documents because I was 
considering adding support to SIMH for the processor described in the 
document. They knew they had the document, but they didn't know where it 
was and didn't know when they could get to it.

But, I have also had good experiences with museums. After the experience 
above, I was nervous about some TOPS-20 documents that I had loaned to 
the Living Computer Museum. I was doing SIMH work with 
DECsystem-/TOPS-20, so I wanted to get the documents back anyway. One 
day I happened to be in that part of town and dropped in without letting 
them know that I was coming and I was able to get all of my documents back.

alan