*** Ideas needed for developing interactive displays....

From: Jules Richardson <julesrichardsonuk_at_yahoo.co.uk>
Date: Tue Sep 7 05:08:38 2004

On Mon, 2004-09-06 at 21:03 -0700, ed sharpe wrote:
> Most of our displays here at the museum are pretty static.....
>
> we are looking for ideas on introducing some interactive component... ideas
> folks?

Well we've got a punched card machine, comptometers, and the 11/34
hooked up to a tape punch which people can use. Plus (nearly) all the 8
bit machines run at weekends for people to use, along with a good
portion of the larger iron. (suprisingly, my fears when I first started
there that the machines would get hammered into oblivion has been
unfounded; the public actually take great care with them)

We've got the Domesday setup running (usually, I'm having a bit of a
reorganise at the mo so it's in bits) which is always popular, plus
we've got a nixie tube counter hooked up to the doorway to count
visitors and people love staring at that :-)

If space ever permits I still plan to put up a large 'image wall' driven
by 80's technology.

I was also pondering having a hard disk with a perspex lid coupled to a
display and keypad so that people can make it seek (along with some sort
of "anatomy of a hard disk" info)

And if we ever get our big plotter going, there's code around to convert
a raster image to a plot - hooked up to a video camera we could produce
huge plots of people for a fee (until we run out of plotter paper :)

We've also got a couple of 11/84's coming in with a huge radar display
attached, I'm sure we can do something interactive with that.

(plus there's mini-projects in the pipeline like getting the weather
satellite receiver and teletext unit working with the Acorn BBC so that
people can play with those...)

Of course the usual problem is lack of space. We badly need different
premises that have more room. Unfortunately the government here doesn't
give a damn about heritage/history and so they won't make any money or
premises available. If anyone knows of a large empty building in the
centre of the UK that we can just have, let me know :-)

cheers,

Jules
Received on Tue Sep 07 2004 - 05:08:38 BST