thought I'd alter the subject just in case the thread police is looking :) As mentioned in the original thread, striking a balance with the types of exhibits is really the best option. I was fortunate to participate here for a decade and noticed at times there can be a shortage in the variety of exhibits. It's just plain logistics, it's very cumbersome to setup minicomputer exhibits. You can't make everyone happy. But you still can appeal to a wider audience, to help sell tickets -- and t-shirts :) In general, I always found it intriguing to make a VCF exhibit with case examples of computer being used in the industry, the real world, where it was put to work. I think that would make an attractive display, and steer away from the gamer. They already have different events around the country specifically for gamers. Versus a static exhibit of a computer, peripherals and software. Personally, I like to collect and record historical info like this about about my first job at SEL. They were around since the early days of the space race and were one of the many "grunts" in the industry. They had to fight for contracts against the big heavyweights such as IBM and the Seven dwarves. I entered their company midstream but I worked with many old timers. And it was very cool to learn of the many contracts they won while being a "grunt" in the market. About the fascinating projects we got to work on. Everything from Nasa, aerospace, military, nuclear, simulators, physics, etc, etc. There were some very exciting projects over there from the 60s, 70s, and 80s. Despite the usual business politics from the suits, I was really proud to have a part in those projects. And so one of my pastimes, as best as I can, is collect info like this on my website. Most museums just collect the machine and software but you never hear about those exciting examples on where it was used. But in my case, finding one of those systems to use in an exhibit from my first job is about as rare as hen's teeth. Because the amount of systems produced is a far magnitude less than IBM or DEC. And then removing them from existing installations is highly improbable :) But this idea can still apply to any other systems out there. I never had a chance yet to exhibit an idea like this, but maybe some time in the future I can. And I would encourage others to try this. Because it goes beyond the "who designed" it or "who wired it", and more about the practical use of a computer. How it made a significant impact in the world. Take for example Mike's SAGE exhibit or in recent years the spreadsheet exhibit from Douglas. I know there's other examples of past exhibits like this that I can't recall at the moment. Some examples like this can obviously be difficult to obtain or replicate for those projects to make a live demonstration in a VCF exhibit. Perhaps just a simplified example can be produced, and I think that's still acceptable. It's not very easy bringing a nuclear power plant to VCF :) But it's nothing that some additional pictures, posters, or multimedia presentation which can supplement the exhibit because of space or logistics. So you can highlight the significance of this work in the real world. This idea may be more difficult for microcomputer exhibits. But one simple example I hoped to exhibit sometime in the future was how microcomputers were increasingly used in laboratory research. Mainly because of economics. Let's face it, companies had a strict budget. Some didn't need megabytes of storage or a supercomputer. And then 8bit CP/M computers were being outpaced by 16bit CP/M computers, then you had the IBM PC market and other 16bit desktop computers. Rugged systems is not really needed for this, but they could still calculate and compute large data sets from laboratory experiments. There are books from the 70s and 80s that illustrate how they were integrated with laboratory instruments to perform experiments. This reminds me of a very old article from the early 80s which I have no luck in recovering these days. During the early Apple][ heyday, they were already comparing the horsepower from the Eniac era. Where it was shown this was just as powerful as during the Manhattan project. Being able to simulate [ie. no graphics] the chain reactions by computing the Markov chain using Monte Carlo algorithms for a nuclear explosion. Maybe Homeland Security wouldn't be too keen these days on this kind of exhibit, but who knows !! So I always found it compelling to learn how computers were put to work. Dan