Are computer museums 'bad'?

[pbirkel@gmail.com]

Yeah.. I've seen the storage rooms in pics of a few museums.. some of them have got multiples Sol 20s and Altairs stacked like firewood.

Remember the scene at the end of "Raiders of the Lost Ark"? That ...

 

[tofro]

Then, I looked at what the Smithsonian might have online about the Mark 8 and, not surprising, they have this beauty...and you may notice that it says "Currently not on view".

That shows a bit the dilemma those museums are in: If you look at this thing (which is a beauty as well in my view), to a layman's visitor, well it's just a boring box with a few switches - it could just as well be an internet radio from the late 2000s - and they wouldn't even stop by its glass case. Computers make awkward exhibits: they only come to life if you interact with them and they make very boring static displays, and that's probably the reason why it's "currently not on view". The stuff we work with is just not attractive for the average museum visitor, for a curator they are just taking up valuable space that could be better used for attractive "viewable" stuff they have. The Cray-1 in their lineup, for example, takes a lot more of their valuable exhibition space with its footprint, but is visually so much more attractive that it actually is on display (probably for other reasons as well, but it is impressive).
You could make these Cinderellas so much more attractive if you allowed visitors direct (not physical, maybe, to protect them, but maybe remote) access to the exhibits, allowing them to interact with them and let them play, probably with a bit of guidance and help. But that means a lot of effort for a museum that may not even have the experts that could come up with such an install.

 

[pbirkel@gmail.com]

I've occasionally wondered what it would be like to have an established "research library" type of facility that combined some public display space with archival storage and access to "qualified" researchers ... to include computer system set up, restoration, and operation for research purposes of limited duration. Do such facilities exist for other categories of equipment / technology artifacts? How do they do it?