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

From: Jules Richardson <julesrichardsonuk_at_yahoo.co.uk>
Date: Fri Sep 10 05:06:43 2004

On Thu, 2004-09-09 at 23:25 +0100, Tony Duell wrote:
> > > > Yes we are planning on having the hp 2000 emulator!
> > > > cheaper to have tsb this way compared to running the whole system which will
> > >
> > > Whereas the machine that runs the emulator will never need repair?
> >
> > That's when you throw it out and get another one, though! (Sorry,
> > indulging in a bit of "Tony baiting" there ;-)
>
> And do you really believe you will always be able to find a machine that
> can run your simulator?

Someone else beat me to it with the idea of simulating the simulator :-)

My approach is generally:

1) Fix the original if time permits
2) Simulate the original using what of the original is available - but
without making mods to the original equipment such that 1) is out of the
question at a later date.
3) Simulate the original on completely modern hardware (ala xmess etc.)

Note that I don't particularly like step 3 at all, and that there should
really be a step 0.5 which is "realise that I don't have enough time to
do any of it" :-)

> Incidentally, it always impresses me how many clock museums keep their
> exhibits running (in most cases about 70% of the clocks are still running
> in my experience). And they're not faked!

Yep, I always places like that. I'm not sure why the parallel doesn't
happen for computer collections (I mean, sure, we get an awful lot of
broken donations, but even so)

> There would be a second one of you (well. OK, not quite :-)) if BP had
> not done all it could to drive me mad. I am not talking about having to
> keep to a conservation policy (in fact one of my moans is that there was
> no proper conservation poiicy), it was more things like sometimes being
> charged to go in, not being able to claim the cost of components (OK, a
> couple of chips doesn't cost much, but I don't see why _I_ should pay for
> parts in their machines), the policy of rading fuses, cables, etc from
> whatever machine was nearest, the fact that I wasn't allowed to look
> through the documentation, and so on.

Actually on that front it's not so bad as it was when you were there -
I've been having a good sort-out of the office, D Block etc. so it's
much easier to find what you want when needed than it was when I first
started going there! We've sort-of got an arrangement on travel expenses
now (after much arguing!) which is certainly a bonus.

Cambridge uni kindly threw a couple of rack-mount PC servers my way last
week with a whole pile of RAID storage, so I should at least have a
decent platform to keep disk / rom images, electronic documentation etc.
on now. I could do with rustling up a DLT drive from somewhere soonish
though for tape backup.

There's not much fixing of hardware going on at present, but then of the
exhibits in the museum room itself nearly everything's operational so
sorting out the stores and the like seemed a more sensible thing to do!

Components expenses I haven't figured out yet - but then I keep on
unearthing piles of components over in D Block so if I can get organised
over there we probably have replacement ICs and the like in a lot of
cases!

seeya,

Jules
Received on Fri Sep 10 2004 - 05:06:43 BST