..one of several thread on VCF exhibit design. Dan Roganti ragooman said:
thought I'd alter the subject just in case the thread police is looking :)
Well, *I'm* looking. As I've said before: on-subject threads are in my interest, because I look for content from decades-old email discussions, and the subject-titles matter to me. Putting that aside... Dan talked about displaying uses of early microcomputers (and minicomputers) in labs and industrial settings. That rings true to me as well. 45 years ago, I was working in those settings, as a digital engineer. There are many other programmers and engineers of my age group, who visit VCF-E and who contribute to modern vintage computing. And, to the VCF's collection. So it's an important audience - see my recent post in a similar thread on Xenix exhibit discussion for what I mean by "audience". So I'm all for Dan's exhibits of minicomputer and early microcomputer use by scientists, engineers, and in industry. For that matter, early accounting machines and programs would be of the same order. Let's keep in mind: the first generation of microcomputer owner-developers, were often techies like these. Not all, but many. I think there's good news, and bad news, about such exhibits. Research papers and university theses from that era and older, are more available on the Web today than ever. University and govt. libraries have digitized their holdings and cataloged them. So a Web search will find them - whereas, years and decades ago, this was exceptional. So the content of such work, sometimes including coding, is available online. But numeric code doesn't exhibit well. Lots of these programs were essentially mathematical in nature. Numbers in, numbers out. Interpreting them was done by humans; there wasn't enough CPU power to waste with graphs and charts, that came later. So did graphic displays, for the most part. This stuff in the original, will be hard to exhibit. Also: the science content will be hard to represent, to most people including the younger crowd (under 30) and to the non-science non-math crowd. But I would not mind seeing, some hard-science stuff at VCF-East. And I think there's an audience for it, to warrant an exhibit or two. And consider this - demonstrating an ANALOG computer is an exercise in pure math, differential equations to be exact. VCF Inc. intends to restore such computers in the near future. So this is "in the cards". But, while it's good to say "here's some atomic reaction codes", explaining the physics or math would be very challenging and take up the viewer's time. That suggests to me the use of a Web page, not an exhibit. And so the practical question becomes this: What do you do with a physical exhibit of period hardware about period users, but on display in the 21st century to people who can't interpret that use, much less the time available to them? One possible answer might be - thinking out loud - is that you use modern computing (or faster vintage computers) to show some of the results. You could do worse than use simple video display hardware, to represent your results, produce some graphics. Or audio output, that's a useful mode of presentation. This will call for some thinking and imagination, and planning. Now, later vintage computing - HP desktop computers and calculators - WERE able to produce graphical results. But are they pretty pictures - which I can make with an oscilloscope and some simple circuits - or are they pictures that have some meaning? Dan also suggests texts from the period, about use of digital technology and lab instruments, to conduct experiments and do real-time data reduction. That resonates with me, Dan: my LINCtape drive reminds me, that the design-purpose of the LINCs was to automate biological-science experiments and tests, to bring computing power to those sciences, *in the 1960's*. DEC borrowed a lot from the LINCs, into their early minicomputers. David Gesswein has brought in some PDP-8 lab-class systems at other VCF-East's. I've got some HP and Heathkit products along those lines, myself. Some of the Heath lab products were developed in Princeton if I recall, that's a local connection. But the challenge is this: either accept a narrow target audience, or to enhance the real-time experience so that mere mortals can appreciate it on exhibit. Herb Johnson my 25 cents'