At 12:00 AM 2/5/02 -0600, Lawrence Walker wrote:
>...
> How do YOU limit your collection when you aren't a Sellam, John Keys
>and others with warehouse space. Seriously. It must be a problem that
>many of you have made a decision on, even when it wasn't your S.O.
>giving an ultimatum. Any guidelines ? Be stern.
I started off simply wanting a TRS-80 model 3 or 4 so I could recover some
programs I had written half a lifetime ago, but then I started attending
flea-markets regularly and fell into the trap of acquiring everything I had
ever used or wanted.
Before it got too bad (20-ish machines), I realized that I wasn't
"honoring" the machines by simply accumulating them, as I didn't have
enough time (and didn't foresee having the time) to play with them, so I
traded some away and sold others on ebay.
Now my approach is focus. Pick one or two or three machines and really go
deep.
A second part of my approach is that I'm trying to document what I have so
others can use it. There is a lot to be said about saving computers and
storing them, but it is all pointless unless the day comes that those
computers and documents in deep storage come out. If you take this
approach to preservation (== documenting and presenting, != having material
possession of a specimen) you quickly realize that it is a herculean task
and it quickly cuts down on the number of machines you could ever give the
treatment to.
A couple great examples of other people on this doing it have recently come up:
Rick Bensene's old calculator museum. It sets a high standard:
http://www.geocities.com/oldcalculators/
Doug Coward's analog computer museum:
http://dcoward.best.vwh.net/analog/
There are others too, but I mention these since they came up recently.
For my machines, I'm busy scanning & OCR'ing documents, and I'm writing an
emulator for one of my "key" machines. When this project is reasonably
complete, I plan on taking on the next machine on my list and doing what I
can for that one. Fortunately, my target machines seem to be ones where
copyright issues aren't likely to prevent me from sharing what I produce
(although, of course, I'd respect the wishes of the copyright holders if
they really care).
Perhaps I'm being foolish -- the emulator I'm writing is written in C and
uses the Win32 API. Although it is pervasive today, it could very well be
that in 20 years it will just be dead bits while the actual machine is
still happy grinding on 5.25" floppies. Still, in the process I've learned
a lot more about how he machine actually works than if I hadn't written the
emulator.
I realize this approach won't work for the majority of people, but you
asked what *I* did to limit my collection mania.
One nice side effect of taking the time to make a web site that documents a
machine is that it draws bees to the flower and you end up getting an
occasional freebie -- like the Sol-20 with Helios disk system I received,
and it cost me nothing more than 20 minutes of driving.
-----
Jim Battle == frustum_at_pacbell.net
Received on Wed Feb 06 2002 - 01:42:41 GMT