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Old 12-12-2007, 06:19 AM
Cappellanus Cappellanus is offline
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Join Date: Jul 2007
Posts: 24
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Wow, I wondered who bought that kit!!! I thought it was that deep-pocket collector in Florida who's assembling a museum.

Yes, many would consider the kit ruined by assembly. On the other-hand, it's yours to do as you please. As a collector of old books (some 500 years old) I always considered collecting antiques a responsibility. We book collectors hate the 19th century people who tore "title-pages" out of rare books to frame and display, or stamped their names in books already 300 years old.

What should you do with it? Museums don't have deep pockets, they hope for donations. Bill Gates has yet to show any nostalgia for old computers, even though this was the machine he hit it big with.

I'd love to see a quality archive of high-quality scans of all printed material, and high-quality scans of all PC boards. The existing internet scans are low quality, except for Grant's copies. I'd also like to see copies of the paper tapes, both photos of the leaders, and raw byte data. I'm unsure if there are "any" real original raw paper tape data for Altair programs on the internet. Most of what's out there, are just memory dumps, I think.

A word about the cassette tapes: These magnetic tapes have far outlived their life expectancy I worry if you play them even once on a dusty old cassette tape player that spent 10 years in your garage, you'll wipe off 30% of the useful signal. Consider only playing them on museum quality archival equipment, with heads that have been properly demagnetized. A list of specialists who read old magnetic tapes for the museum and library industry are here: http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub...resources.html Yes, it would be expensive.

In any case, you're now the keeper of a unique relic. Maybe that's a terrible responsibility. I wish I had the same delemma!!! If you want to part-out any of the tapes (paper or magnetic) I'm willing to take some of the responsibility off your hands!!!

Last edited by Grant Stockly; 09-10-2012 at 09:12 PM.
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