[vcf-midatlantic] Museum report

[Dave McGuire]

  We cannot keep the hardware functioning for 10000 years, or even 100
years.  There are rubber and plastic components in a lot of this stuff,
and they are slowly deteriorating, depolymerizing, and falling to bits.

  Our only hope in that are is that accessible, inexpensive, low-volume
manufacturing techniques, such as 3D printing, mature quickly enough for
us to be able to replace those components.

              -Dave

On 12/29/2015 10:06 PM, Joseph Oprysko via vcf-midatlantic wrote:
> My view on this is not the fact that we are in able to keep the HARDWARE
> functioning. We can keep that maintained for 10000 years. The magnetic
> media utilized by the disk drives have been reaching their end of life, NOS
> boxes have been opened, used, and found to be damaging to the hardware as
> the media is sloughing or flaking off the Mylar of the disk itself. So the
> question becomes restoration vs visual preservation while not losing
> logical functionality.
> 
> On Tuesday, December 29, 2015, Douglas Crawford via vcf-midatlantic <
> vcf-midatlantic at lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> wrote:
> 
>>
>> Our exhibit next time won't have the 1541 drives, but will use uIEC instead
>>> to reduce power and troubleshooting.
>>>
>>
>> My $.02
>> Aw, lets be careful about that. I like the convenience of the SD card file
>> systems
>> and they have their place, but working disk drives are important to the
>> demoing history.
>> This was clear to me at NY Maker, and also was commented to me by
>> several individuals at VCFE.  If we can't keep disk drives going, we might
>> as well
>> admit failure on the whole restoration scene.
>>
>> BTW: I think the IBM PC boot drive is bad too or the DOS floppy in the
>> drive is bad.
>> It boots right into ROM basic.
>>
>> DC
>>
> 
> 


-- 
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA