Australian Computer Museum Looking For Space

tqft writes "The Australian Computer Museum Society needs space. Basically they have nowhere to store their large collection of hardware. Can you help? Do you or your employer have the floor space they could use? Or should it all be trashed?"

i own a big space.

[Anonymous Coward]

you can use my landfill in China but you must pay me $20 per item to haul this poisonous shit away to a country without stupid laws or status quo's against official bribes.

For those of you who want to know where it is.

[sould]

It's in Sydney.

You find it buried on this page [terrigal.net.au] - looks like its currently at a self storage center in Sydney. (Near where the olympic village was).

Why post an Auscentric article like this to a USian site is beyond me, but for those interested, the map is here [whereis.com.au]

Re:Australian History?

[mvdw]

Yes, I know you are speaking in jest, but it just so happens that some of the oldest paintings known to exist are right here in Australia. 400 years for a Michaelangelo? Harumph, try 40,000+years (no, I did not accidentally type an extra '0') for some of the rock paintings in Kakadu.

Re:Australian History?

[sould]

sigh...

I'm Australian and I'll bite.

The first Australian Computer: was developed in 1946 [csiro.au] - and one of only four in the world at the time.

If you really want to consider the speed of technology - check out how American Cell phone market penetration compares to Australian Cell phone market penetration

Re:1000 meters^2?

[jpt.d]

Otherwise known as approximately 31.6 metres by 31.6 metres. Not that much.

Re:Whats the speed of a PDP11

[hughk]

An 11/40 ran with a cycle time of around 1us. This is kind of comparable to a 6502 based machine. Instructions were very much CISC, so they could take many cycles to execute (up to around ten or so for many instructions and more for stuff like integer divide). However, the PDP 11 instruction set (devised by Gordon Bell) was much richer than the 6502. The machine could be easily single stepped and boasted a real front panel with lots of flashing lights and rows of switches.

The processor was on three or four boards, but then you had memory and peripheral controllers on additional boards. Subsequent models were faster and often smaller.

A fairly minimal 11/40 installation would occupy a medium sized rack. With a second hard disk you had to have a second or use a full-sized rack.

Jumping to to the next message, pdp-11 style:

jmp @(r4)+

(Used by threaded code compilers like Fortran)

Museum Seeks Computers

[Tackhead]

Shipping might be a pain, but there's always the Computer History Museum [computerhistory.org] in San Jose.

Seriously, if there are significant machines in the collection (and there certainly appear to be), and the alternative is the dumpster (shudder!), the Aussie museum should contact them ASAP and see what can be arranged.

Re:Reduce...

[Mignon]

"Peppercorn rental" ... means exactly what it sounds like.

I couldn't imagine what this sounds like, so for the benefit of other underachievers of the American public high-school system, I took to Google and the OED. It means a token rent. In actual use, it may refer to the rent paid on an object whose lease term has expired, so that the rent just reflects the decreased value of the object, and is typically about 2-3% of the original cost, or one month's payment per year [ashcontracts.co.uk].

The OED had some charming quotes about people who paid annual rent of a peppercorn.

Good luck to the museum!