[SIGCIS-Members] Paul Allen's Personal Museum

[Thomas Haigh]

An interesting story at
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111903596904576516552161014410.ht
ml

It states that Paul Allen has commissioned a kilt-wearing grizzly graduate
student to roam the globe tracking down rare machines of a physical size
impractical for lesser collectors, such as a PDP-7 and IBM 70XX series
machines. They're being restored for a personal museum. I hadn't heard of
Ian King, but apparently he's a computing veteran working on an historical
Ph.D. in the University of Washington Information School. The museum is
online at http://www.pdpplanet.com/. 

The more machines that get preserved the better, and it certainly does more
good for history than most billionaire hobbies. Perhaps this will evolve
into a sustainably endowed public museum, or the machines will eventually be
donated elsewhere. 

Yet when I see something like this is does make me ponder the widening
disconnect between the growing community of scholars working on many aspects
of the history of computing with minimal financial support and the
comparatively huge amounts of money being spent/given by billionaires to
support preservation with no involvement from Ph.D. historians. Maybe it's
inevitable that the interests of the two groups would evolve in different
directions. It's also true that academic priorities may have moved further
than necessary from micro-level practice and materiality over the past few
decades.

This might be one of the topics for discussion at the forthcoming SIGCIS
workshop, where I'm pleased to say that the panelists include people from
the Smithsonian, Henry Ford Museum, Charles Babbage Institute, and Computer
History Museum as well as academics from a variety of disciplines.
http://www.sigcis.org/workshop11 

Tom