Well, I didn't know that my original posting about the
Dell winner would generate so many postings ;-)
In spite of the pros/cons about the lawyer who turned
over his Altair for a WinPC, one good thing (I think)
that came out of this contest is publicity/awareness regarding
the preservation of classics. Case in point is that
when I got home last night and finally had a chance to
read yesterday's local paper, in the business section there was
an article about the Dell contest and the museum, including a photo
of one of the curator (David Weil) trying to bring up a Commodore PET.
While I wasn't surprised to hear about the contest & museum
on the 'net, I was quite surprised to read about it in a
local paper here in central North Carolina (right there next
to the news about Red Hat). It was an Associated Press article,
so it is bound to have appeared in other papers nationwide.
FWIW, the article says that the museum has 200 "pieces", including
a 360 mainframe, "the KIM Homebrew computer, a kit which sold for
$25 ..." (I wonder if they dropped a zero), and a "Royal
Precision Vacuum Tube Computer" - described as being built in
1963, with 113 vacuum tubes (sounds like a small number to me),
drom memory, disk, & paper tape reader. The article also said
there was some kind of storage disk from 1965 that was the
size of a tractor-trailer tire, holding 2.5 Mbytes, and had
to be sandblasted to be erased. (Huh???).
Anyhow, this kind of awareness is a good thing, IMO.
At 11:01 AM 8/21/99 -0700, Sellam wrote:
>The Altair is being donated to the Computer Museum of America in Mesa,
>California.
>
>http://www.computer-museum.org
Regards,
Alex
Calculator History & Technology Web Page
http://aknight.home.mindspring.com/calc.htm
Received on Sat Aug 21 1999 - 21:26:08 BST