Agreed with Dave. My thought is that, yes, the museum and event are there to preserve history and educate people , and hopefully to grab those who have an innate (or latent) interest in the subject. The trick is how best to do so. The primary facts that keep me engaged are what a system is capable of doing (it's reason for being), it's history, and how it works. If you can present these three things in an accessible manner, and possibly throw in some interactivity, you have a winning exhibit, regardless of the subject matter. On Wed, Jan 11, 2017 at 12:30 PM, Dave McGuire via vcf-midatlantic < vcf-midatlantic@lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> wrote:
On 01/11/2017 12:06 PM, Jason Perkins via vcf-midatlantic wrote:
"how do we present our hobby in such a way to draw people in and help them appreciate it the way that we do?"
That's exactly why I posed this question. A display needs to be interactive and eye catching to be successful, otherwise we may as well do what the Smithsonian does and have unpowered machines behind plexiglass. That's not to say we need to hide the "power applications" for the machines, we just need to show something that would interest everyone.
That's just the problem. Catching the interest of "everyone" should not, in my opinion, be the goal. Not everyone will be, or even has the capacity to be interested in this stuff. Retroactively modifying what these machines were in order to bend them around to the modern expectations of every element of the modern perpetually-entertained public is misrepresentation, plain and simple.
Sure, people occasionally played games on the company mainframe or the department's minicomputer. But the key here is the word "occasionally". It wasn't an all-games-all-the-time thing. These computers were built to get work done, and that's what the vast majority of their CPU cycles were spent doing.
Show them for what they were meant to do, and more importantly, what they really did. Play an occasional game, but show a business chart of accounts or some sort of fluid flow simulation most of the time. Because that's what actually happened.
If that means we don't appeal to EVERY random person off the street, then so be it. I submit that this is neither fatal nor even undesirable.
Is the event (and by extension, the museum) there to preserve history and educate people about it, or try to induct every person we see into the hobby side of it?
-Dave
-- Dave McGuire, AK4HZ New Kensington, PA