Living Computer Museum

[Eric Smith]

On Thu, May 28, 2020 at 2:20 PM Chris Hanson via cctalk <
cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:

> This is one of the things that disappointed me most about the Computer
> History Museum in Mountain View, CA. Sure you can’t let the public interact
> with *everything*, but since so much of computing since its inception has
> been about interaction with active systems, just displaying them is leaving
> out a large amount of what really makes them interesting. The CHM does a
> lot of great preservation, archival, and curatorial work, but this really
> feels like a glaring omission.
>

When we restored the PDP-1 at CHM, we *really* wanted to make sure that the
public could interact with it, though in a limited fashion. Ken Sumrall and
I built quick-and-dirty Spacewar control boxes out of particle board and
arcade switches, which were intended for restoration team use, and we
originally thought that we would later build some "more authentic" control
boxes. (The control boxes used in Boston had disappeared, and in any case
we don't know whether they were "original".) However, Steve Russell (author
of the Spacewar game) pointed out that our hastily knocked together control
boxes actually were "authentic" in the sense that the originals were also
hastily knocked together out of whatever was at hand.

It would certainly be nice if there was a practical way to allow more
hands-on use of the PDP-1, but I can't think of any way of doing that which
CHM would be likely to approve, and I don't disagree with them. It's
somewhat difficult to keep the machine in good working order even when only
a few skilled people operate it.

Eric