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Retro Computing Museum In Ukraine Destroyed By Russian Bomb (pcgamer.com) 131

Posted by BeauHD from the now-only-existing-in-memories dept.
A privately owned collection of more than 500 pieces of retro computer and technology history has been destroyed by a Russian bomb in the city of Mariupol. PC Gamer reports: The destruction was highlighted by Mark Howlett on Twitter, and confirmed by the Ukrainian Software and Computer Museum account, which operates museums in Kharkiv and Kyiv. The owner of the Mariupul collection, Dmitry Cherepanov, is reportedly safe, though his collection of computers, consoles, and assorted tech from fifty years of computing has been wiped out. "There is neither my museum nor my house," writes Cherepanov on his Facebook page, it8bit.club.

The museum itself may be gone, but Cherepanov has been chronicling his collection of exhibits online for some time now, and though this is all that's left, it is still a resource worth checking out. There are a host of fascinating old machines, including the Commodore C64 [...]. As well as images and information about all the 120 computers and consoles in his collection, Cherepanov also hosts RetroBit Radio on the site, too. Cherepanov has set up a Paypal account for donations, the details of which you can find on his Facebook page.
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Retro Computing Museum In Ukraine Destroyed By Russian Bomb

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  • It's awesome that he was able to catalog his collection online. At least the fond memories are digitally captured. Obviously old equipment like this isn't all that meaningful in the face of a terrible war. But it's a reminder that everything is very temporary especially in times like these. Hope he's keeping his head up.

    • Obviously old equipment like this isn't all that meaningful in the face of a terrible war.

      This is wrong. We keep hearing that things are "less important than people's lives" but that's a comparison we shouldn't make. This was what he was attempting to achieve with his life and this was his contribution to the lives of all the people around him. What is being done here is an attempt to make his life meaningless. To destroy his achievements.

      There's a term for this cultural genocide [wikipedia.org] which is a war crime. This places the Russian army now alongside the Nazis in the 1940s and the Turks who destroyed

      • It's normal dictator policy. Destroy the past to destroy a people. ISIS did the same in Iraq, the book burnings from the 40s were the same, the banning of the Bo language, the plundering of Africa's heritage, the native American reservations.

        We are a function of the past. Those who lose their past rarely thrive and often collapse entirely until they've had time to forge a new past.

        The distinction between people, things, language and history is blurred at best.

  • I couldn't find anything of note on the website.

    It's a shame because I really wanted to see the pics of the mysterious Commodore 64. I think the 64 meant they only made 64 of them.

    • There really aught to be an IQ restriction for joining Slashdot. To be fair to actual humans, rather than escapee Ogrons, a restriction of positive double digits or better should be sufficient.

      • How about an IQ requirement before becoming an editor? They'd have to fire every single one of the ones they've got now, though.

      • And who is going to be trusted to administer the IQ test?

        Hopefully not the grandkids of the people who invented literacy tests for voting.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by fleabay ( 876971 )
        Since I am the parent of you comment, I assume you're talking about me.

        I was serious about the hacking. It really does appear that the site got hacked.

        Of course the rareness of the C64 was a joke.

  • Russia has already lost the war and redefined the goal to be less ambitious. They need to withdraw already and stop killing people.

    • They won't withdraw if they think they can take Mariupol and Odesa.

      • They won't withdraw if they think they can take Mariupol and Odesa.

        Russia's new objectives don't include Odessa.

        Only the region east of the Dnieper River.

        • Russia is losing more and more control every day now. At this rate, they might even end up losing Crimea, which, if lost, would definitely end Putinâ(TM)s reign.

      • They can't take Odessa. They're getting pushed back farther and farther from Odessa.

        Even Mariupol seems unlikely, as the Ukrainian army is pushing closer and closer. Soon the siegers will be under siege. But at what a cost of life.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by fazig ( 2909523 )
      It's fine.
      I read all the games in the museum were Wolfenstein from the perspective of the Nazis winning. And of course Company of Heroes 2.

      (beware of sarcasm)

    • Conscripts, as opposed to professionals, will be the intelligentsia and likely opposed to Putin's dictatorship. All provided obsolete gear that Ukraine now has to dispose of, not Russia.

      The generals who died are likely opposed to Putin's imperialism.

      The people believed executed were in jobs Putin now essentially controls directly.

      The civilians in Ukraine were likely their only serious competitors in the markets the region goes for.

      The people important to Putin's military dictatorship are all policing Moscow

      • what matters is that his power has solidified.

        It's not clear that it has. Losing the war makes him look weak.

        Certainly Putin is sitting in his office, trying to figure out who betrayed him.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by jd ( 1658 )

          He betrayed himself, but this isn't The Prisoner episode "Hammer Into Anvil" and Number 6 won't get Putin to order himself replaced.

          He's weak, yes, but Boris Johnson is also weak and has been for years. By making everyone around him weaker still, and having an opposition that won't, Boris is weak but unassailable. Putin is doing much the same. He's absolutely fragile right now, but absolutely nobody wants to take the risk to replace him. (Especially after Biden. Yeesh, that was stupid. Now, if anyone does a

    • Russia has already lost the war and redefined the goal to be less ambitious. They need to withdraw already and stop killing people.

      The new war goal isn't to take Donbass.

      The new goal is to conclude the war with a big enough "victory" so that Putin isn't assassinated or at least forced from power.

      The Russian army is gaining casualties at an unacceptable rate, not only is news of that leaking back home and creating political problems but at a certain point the army itself might just collapse.

      This makes for a very unpredictable situation:

      1) Is Putin going to try playing the Nuke card at some point? He'll be tempted if he's desperate but h

      • Ironically, by the end of the special operation they might not even control the parts of Donbas that they did at the start.

      • If the Russian army gets decimated by Ukraine then a lot of people suddenly realize that the Russian state doesn't have the monopoly they thought it did

        The Russian National Guard is Putin's personal army, and is authorized to fire on civilian crowds (in certain situations).

        ) If the Russian army goes into full retreat it's hard to see Ukraine stopping until they retake Crimea.

        This is an interesting question. The entryway into Crimea is narrow and easy to defend. Could they take it if they wanted to?

        • Depends on who is defending Crimea at that point if Ukraine tries to retake it. Those that were defending it may have been decimated by the current conflict, and the new defenders may be less willing to hold that area.

        • If the Russian army gets decimated by Ukraine then a lot of people suddenly realize that the Russian state doesn't have the monopoly they thought it did

          The Russian National Guard is Putin's personal army, and is authorized to fire on civilian crowds (in certain situations).

          True, but this is more about perception. Governments tend to have an air of invincibility, but if the Russian army gets creamed then all Russian institutions start looking more vulnerable.

          ) If the Russian army goes into full retreat it's hard to see Ukraine stopping until they retake Crimea.

          This is an interesting question. The entryway into Crimea is narrow and easy to defend. Could they take it if they wanted to?

          If the Russian army goes into full collapse I don't see why not. But I'm not sure how the Russian population responds to that.

      • Lukashenko isn't resisting, he does exactly what Putin tells him to do. Problem is, Belarusian army isn't doing what Lukashenko tells them to do. The army just plain refused to go when the invasion started. That empty stretch of Ukraine-Belarus border with no fighting, that was their spot, it remains empty. There was a similar problem with Black Sea Fleet, Russian marines just plain refused to get off the ship in early days of invasion that's why there are no Russian boots in Odessa. They probably solved th

        • Lukashenko isn't resisting, he does exactly what Putin tells him to do. Problem is, Belarusian army isn't doing what Lukashenko tells them to do. The army just plain refused to go when the invasion started.

          You have any source? Lukashenko has been helping Putin as much as he can by threatening Putin, but it sounds like he wants to stay out of it.

          At the start of the invasion I think there wasn't much pressure to go along because Putin thought it would be a cake walk. At this point, as much as Lulkashenko does what Putin wants most of the time he still has some independence and right now it's very much in his self interest to keep out.

    • Putin can't withdraw. That's the problem with might-makes-right politics, it works, but if you one day show any weakness then the knives come out and you'll see exactly how many enemies you made.
  • Trump and friends are applauding. I wish they would just get it done with and move to Moscow to be closer to their overlord.

  • This is a real loss (Score:4, Informative)

    by An Ominous Cow Erred ( 28892 ) on Saturday March 26, 2022 @03:45AM (#62390907)

    A lot of commenters are saying "Yeah the C64 is not rare"

    Maybe so, but there were also a ton of rare computers in the collection, including *very* rare Soviet bloc computers. Computers were not as widely available in Soviet times, and got heavily junked when communism fell, because way better stuff was almost immediately available. There was some really hard to get stuff preserved at this museum.

    • The Russians intentionally destroyed the museum because they thought it was full of cutting edge tech which had fallen into enemy hands.

      • The Russians intentionally destroyed the museum because they thought it was full of cutting edge tech which had fallen into enemy hands.

        Dude. They aren't even destroying their ACTUAL cutting-edge tech before handing it over to Ukraine. Pantsir, S300/400, their comms trucks full of encryption gear with current keys, tanks with ERA intact and fully loaded with ammo, publicized prototype equipment deployed and then abandoned... it goes on and on. Their front lines do not give half a crap whether their tech is compromised.

      • Russia was still cranking out Germanium transistors until the 1990s. The rest of the world all moved to superior silicon in the 1960s.

    • A lot of commenters are saying "Yeah the C64 is not rare"

      Maybe so, but there were also a ton of rare computers in the collection, including *very* rare Soviet bloc computers. Computers were not as widely available in Soviet times, and got heavily junked when communism fell, because way better stuff was almost immediately available. There was some really hard to get stuff preserved at this museum.

      The rare stuff is really important but the C64 shouldn't be allowed to pass either. There is a big difference between a C64 sitting in someone's house which one or two people will have access to and a C64 in a museum together with people who know about it and can show things with it. In the second case people who know nothing about it can see it, understand what it did and learn from it. It's worth visiting the Centre for Computing History [computinghistory.org.uk] in Cambridge, UK to get a real idea. Some of the hardware at The N [tnmoc.org]

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        They also had a lot of software for the C64 that isn't widely available elsewhere, even if the hardware is. Also some peripherals and upgrades that were unique to Ukraine and the USSR, like Cyrillic text support.

        • Just to add an interesting factoid, for Western computers that COULDN'T do software font tables (like CP/M-ish clones), they'd make an alternate font ROM with Cyrillic characters, solder it piggy-back onto the "official" font rom, then use a SPDT toggle switch to select the desired ROM's CS pin. Kludgy, but clever.

          I think the practice was also common with pre-SVGA PC clones in countries where the default US/Western Europe character set was inadequate. VGA allowed soft fonts, but only 16 characters... and 9

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

            Thanks, that's the kind of detail that museums like this are invaluable for.

            In Japan they had different graphics hardware and different operating systems for Japanese language support, some of which were somewhat DOS compatible, and later supported by Windows. Japanese machines tended to have much better graphics than western computers because of the resolution and memory needed for Japanese text. They often had separate video RAM, and it was often larger than main RAM. For example, a lot of MSX machines ha

    • Now this, this crystalizes the loss. The odds were incredibly long that I would ever visit Mariupol. I didn't even know that name, or about this museum until it got blown up. Imagine all the people in the area though, who visited during peacetime. I can see myself driving around just for the heck of it, getting tired and pulling off in that city. "So what is there to do here?" and somebody might mention the computer museum and I'd check it out and get to see old Soviet computers and stuff I'd never hea

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by havana9 ( 101033 )
      I've looked at the photos, and there was a Commodore SX64, that isn't that common. But in another photo there are some ZX Spectrum, together with some soviet-era clones that are quite rare. Not to mention the original Soviet computers like the Mikroska and the BK-01.
      Also some beige box computer were actually red box computers and were made in East Germany or Czechoslovakia.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      A lot of commenters are saying "Yeah the C64 is not rare"

      The C64 as a whole is not rare, but there are so many variants of it that some variants may be more rare than others.

      A Soviet era C64 might be extremely rare simply because it would be almost impossible for the USSR to import them - perhaps they were imported at the tail end of the C64's production run in the early 90s. Plus given the economic times, it would have been extremely expensive.

      So a Soviet localized C64 might be an extremely rare machine -

  • Nowadays, crappy 386 and Pentium beige box PCs from the 90s and 00s are considered vintage collectible items. I shit you not: go to Youtube and search for vintage PCs, and you'll find a bajillion channels dedicated on restoring and preserving completely uninteresting shite no-name DOS and Windows boxes from the era, and marvelling at stupid turbo buttons and 8-bit Soundblaster sound cards or whatever; The younger computer collector is easily pleased these days.

    At this rate, when the war is over, the Mariupo

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Shinobi ( 19308 )

      And to late 90 and early 2000's collectors, the C64's, Amigas etc were considered meh, because they were so common.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Viol8 ( 599362 )

      "completely uninteresting shite no-name DOS and Windows boxes"

      Almost certainly there were thick clowns just like you saying the same thing back in victorian times or early 20th century about home appliances which meant 99.9% got scrapped and the remaining ones are now rare and in museums.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Misagon ( 1135 )

      Still "vintage", by definition. Those computers are just of younger vintage. Nostalgia is nostalgia.

      Self-proclaimed vintage computer connoisseurs want older vintages though.

    • There are still things to be learned and preserved from the Pentium era of computing.

      For instance, the composer of the original soundtrack for EverQuest (1999) pushed the limits of what could be achieved with wavetable synthesis on sound cards like the SoundBlaster AWE32. Sure, we have the MIDI files and sound banks, but attempts to recreate the music with emulators still sounded incomplete. It took some investigation using original hardware to determine what was missing. One such finding: https://www.ta [takproject.net]

  • Oh no! (Score:2)

    by kenh ( 9056 )

    A privately owned collection of more than 500 pieces of retro computer and technology history has been destroyed by a Russian bomb in the city of Mariupol.

    Oh No! Shit just got real!

  • The take away here should be that itâ(TM)s impossible to argue that a computer museum in a residential house is a âoemilitary targetâ.

    So the bombing of the museum was a war crime.

  • A privately owned collection of more than 500 pieces of retro computer and technology history has been destroyed by a Russian bomb

    To the Rooskies, it was a high-tech computer facility.

  • Necessary to destroy original Mario Kart also! Could be used against state-of-art Russian guidance systems!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by saider ( 177166 )

      In related news, NATO F-35s are set to get their Turtle countermeasure upgrades shortly.

  • In other news thousands of people died.

  • Every war and disaster brings these moments of cognitive dissonance. You break down crying over a dead dog or cat in the street, or a shattered teapot. Then you whack yourself for caring about a dog or cat or teapot, when people have died.

    You're crying for the lost world of safety and comfort that human beings built there, the place that had teapots, and happy little cats getting a treat, and computer museums. When we hear of disaster, we look to how many humans died, the ultimate accounting, and che

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