Taking control of your collection

From: Bob Shannon <bshannon_at_tiac.net>
Date: Tue Feb 5 10:04:31 2002

What I'm doing it working to trade bredth for depth.

I've managed to accumulate stuff from SBC's to Lisp Machines, but my
clear
love is for HP mini's.

There is so much information for whatever machines you choose to
collect,
that to
really understand them well you need to specialize. To really support a

vintage
system well, you need to have spare parts, development and debug tools,
documentation,
etc. If you multiply this times several unrelated systems it quickly
can
become
unmanagable.

So I've decided that if its not HP, or an exceptional peice, its going.
So
I'm
trading off whole sub-collections (my Apollo gear is next to go) for HP
stuff.

Of course there are some non-HP things I'll keep, my Imsai, Imlac, and
ELF-II. But
the PDP-11 stuff and what-not are now in my eyes taking space away from
HP
systems I
would prefer to have in their space.

So set some physical limit on the space your willing (or able) to
dedicate
to your
collection, and some minimum standards on how it will be displayed.
Simply
having a
cool old machine stuffed away in a closet is not doing that machine
justice.

Once you have a physical limit, you may start looking at some items in
your
collection
through different eyes. Find something that links the items in your
collection,
otherwise its an accumulation, not a collection. Also a common linkage
will
often
mean that some of the spare parts and documentation is useful to more
than
one
machine.

The result will be a more managable, coherent collection that takes up
less
space, and
is far more presentable as a valuable collection as opposed to rooms
overfull with
what appears to be scrap.
Received on Tue Feb 05 2002 - 10:04:31 GMT