Herb wrote:
The last lesson of Bob Pease, may well be as suggested in the title of the article: "What is this stuff, anyhow?". What's to be done - if anything - with artifacts of technical work and products? Do they have value? What do they mean? Can they inform us, or simply amuse us, or do they just get in the way?
On 8/26/2019 4:01 PM, Evan Koblentz wrote:
This is why, when giving museum tours, I focus hard on explaining the "so what" instead of technical specifications. Other than storage (how many of these doodads are needed to make one modern memory cards), most of our visitors couldn't care less about speed, memory, or whatever else. They want to know what is this thing and why should I care. If you don't make that point early, then you lose them.
So Evan, what works for the visitors you describe? Do they need an explanation of "floppy disks" or "where's the mouse?". What do they end up caring about, from what they see, about a world before their time or outside some technical interest? The Pease circuits are a harder "sell" because they lack reference to anything at all, if one doesn't know a wire or an IC or a circuit. But I'd not sell them - exhibit or curate them - to anyone BUT circuit designers and period-engineers. And that's fine, just another specialized collection. Any providence or function - as Dean suggests is useful - won't work for anyone beyond those knowledgeable in the craft of design. But - most of them will see "obsolete" and lose interest. "Catching" them is like Evan's problem in catching modern interest in old computers - when both "old" and "computers" are out of vogue today. Regards, Herb -- Herbert R. Johnson, New Jersey in the USA http://www.retrotechnology.com OR .net preserve, recover, restore 1970's computing email: hjohnson AT retrotechnology DOT com or try later herbjohnson AT retrotechnology DOT info