The current thought is microprocessors only. An early POWER or VAX 6000 CPU board gives me yet another idea for an exhibit in the future. I'll keep the offer in mind! Yes, if we can pull it off, the thought is to store the "All these things on the wall" exhibit for a later return and fill that space with microprocessors. My thought is "All these things..." is just one way to express the effect of Moore's Law on the world and we're going to try to come up with different ways to illustrate the exponential growth over the years. Furthermore, the hope is to bake the history lesson into much of the museum. This allows us to change things up while alwaysl letting us teach one of the most important lessons to the next (and current) generation. Part of it is that we talk endlessly about Z80s, 68000s, 6502s, et. all and computers that use them, but so few people get to see the actual microprocessor. The 1802 and 6502 are now visible on the RCA COSMAC and KIM-1 and what a difference it makes (thanks Corey and Tony). And comparing a 4004 to a modern Intel i7 with some signage of things like clock speed and transistor count would be very educational. On 2/11/2020 12:20 PM, Jameel Akari via vcf-midatlantic wrote:
Is the exhibit meant to be microprocessors, or CPUs in general? If the latter, I think you need separate "tracks" based maybe on market segment. I second the notion that this is liable to become cluttered if not limited in scope and/or separated into categories.
Like, I can donate or loan an early POWER or a VAX 6000 CPU board (they are both awesome looking artifacts) but now you've got large things next to very small things. ;)
My $0.02 : If this is going to run alongside the 6502 theme of VCF East, focus on microprocessors including the 6502, ending somewhere around the 80386 or early RISC timeframe, and then fast-forwarding from there to near present day. You can fill it and grow it out later, but with literal exponential growth it's hard to take in the entirety of 50 years in one go.