Australia's Largest Private Computer Collection In Pictures 131
Da Massive writes "UNIX PDP-7, a classic DEC PDP-8, the original IBM PC, Commodore's C64, Apple's Lisa, a MITS Altair 8800 made famous by Bill Gates, through to a working PDP-11 that plays the ADVENTURE and DUNGEON games. Max Burnet has got it all. Burnet has turned his home in the leafy suburbs of Sydney into arguably Australia's, if not the world's, largest private computer museum. Since retiring as director of Digital Equipment Corporation a decade ago, Burnet has converted his home into a snapshot of computer history. Every available space from his basement to the top floor of his two-storey home is covered with relics from the past. On top of his hardware collection are numerous punch cards, tape machines (including the original paper tape) and over 6000 computer reference books. So in demand is his collection that one Australian film called on him to recreate a computer setting (PDP-9) for a movie about the moon landing in 1969."
I'm sure most geeks have a few old computers.. (Score:4, Insightful)
...lying around the house. Problem is , while most of us of a certain age look back wistfully to times past when there was so much more variety in the computer ecosystem with cool ideas popping up left , right and centre - the truth is (and I speak from personal experience) that when on occasion you get those 8 bits or whatever out their box and fire them up you realise that actually , well, they're a bit rubbish really and computers today really are so much better. Still , its nice to preserve them , just not so much fun to use them!
Re:I have my old zx spectrum. (Score:4, Insightful)
"these all freshers burst out with laughter."
Unfortunately that attitude seems to me to lead on to the rather flagrant waste of resources in modern software. A lot of the new coders think that because they so much resource available they don't need to make any attempt to make the program they're writing efficient in any sense - CPU, memory, disk , you name it. This also applies IMO to the fashion for compiling to VMs rather than raw machine code.
Re:I have my old zx spectrum. (Score:5, Insightful)
When I arrived at Penn State my dorm president gave my an old Commodore Amiga 2000HD with a 1 megabyte hard drive. I tried a couple times to reformat it to a larger size, but it stubbornly refused. So there I was, stuck with a hard drive no bigger than a floppy. Not too useful.
If some freshmen laughed at me I'd remind them that just in the time since they were born (circa 1990) to their first year of college, we've moved from 10 megahertz to 3000 megahertz, and from 1 megabyte to 4000 megabytes. Someday their "uberpowerful PC" will look pretty primitive when Intel develops 300 gigahertz Hydra-Cores with 2 terabytes of RAM. Technology moves very rapidly. (I'd also remind them that they're going to look back at their photos in ten years and laugh at themselves.)
It's a shame (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a shame that most of these computers probably don't run any more - it's a bit like going to an aviation museum and seeing all these planes that will never fly again - it's a little bit sad. I'd love to see a museum with as much hardware *working* as possible - where you can see the blinkenlights, type something at the console, or whatever. Unfortunately, it's probably not very practical with many of these machines.
My own interest in the retrocomputing scene is the old 8 bit systems, and for those, it's very practical to play with them. The best thing about the old 8 bits is that they are fun. Modern computers, especially the ones running Windows, are no longer much fun to work on. Everything's closed up in secret recipes, EULAs, and corporate BS, and in any case there are layers and layers and layers of abstraction before you get to the hardware. Linux or BSD is of course infinitely better, and the reason I love open source software is it gives me the freedom to tinker. However, it's still extremely complex, and it can take a lot of code just to get something simple to happen - for instance, if you're making a piece of hardware, you've got to write a device driver before you can even start experimenting with your creation.
So I still love to tinker with 8 bit systems because it's fun and you can do some surprising things with them. Like, this weekend, I did streaming video on my Sinclair Spectrum: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hf8rz0sb298 [youtube.com] - with an ethernet card that I made for the machine.
Re:I have my old zx spectrum. (Score:3, Insightful)
And you know in 20 years they will be in exactly the same position. Software and hardware will have progressed so much the youngsters will say: "what less than 20 cores?"
This museum needs a home and a benefactor(s). (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a shame that CIO Magazine which goes to many business people who lead large computer companies made no mention that this museum needs help. Maybe they weren't asked, perhaps. Most of those machines will probably go to the wreckers. A few dedicated individuals maintain this museum at $1000/month out of their own pocket. Over the years of people asking for financial help and space not a single company is interested in helping to preserve this history. Nor has any Federal or State Govt come to help as they don't see that Australias track record in computing is important. Having immigrants answer a question about Don Bradman on their citizenship test is far more important. There are enough computer companies in Australia that owe so much to computer history that they should find a permanent place for this treasure and support it.
Re:Even with all that notoriety... (Score:3, Insightful)
I can understand that.
I have an unusually nice wife and every acquisition is a historical achievement in the fine art of negotiation. I can only imagine how hard it is for him to keep all this gear in their home.
Re:Who cares about these computers ? (Score:2, Insightful)
But I understand that kids who just want an intarnetbox to access myspace would be less interested.
Re:This museum needs a home and a benefactor(s). (Score:3, Insightful)
Instead of begging for handouts, why don't you try a free market approach - CHARGE for it. If I were in this guy's shoes, I would set up displays in my basement and charge an entrance fee to tourists to "come see the history of computing".
Another possibility is to join forces with a local car museum, to see if you can borrow an empty room for your computer history display. Since people are already looking at the old cars, they're likely to have an interest in anything that's old, including computers. Don't display everything, but just pick out a few key computers that changed the course of history and charge $1 to enter the room. Perhaps have one of them (like the C=64) setup to play a game (say Arkanoid).
Most of us are engineers. We're used to solving problems. "Funding" is just another problem to be solved; be creative.