Maybe we should invite Mr. Allen to attend or send one of his people. Or even sponsor a session? Jonathan ----- Original Message ----- From: Thomas Haigh <thaigh@computer.org> To: members@sigcis.org Sent: Mon, 29 Aug 2011 14:25:03 -0500 (CDT) Subject: [SIGCIS-Members] Paul Allen's Personal Museum 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 _______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members@sigcis.org, the email discussion list of SHOT SIGCIS. The list archives are at http://sigcis.org/pipermail/members/ and you can change your subscription options at http://sigcis.org/mailman/listinfo/members -- Jonathan CoopersmithAssociate Professor Department of History Texas A&M University College Station, TX 77843-4326 979.845.7151 979.862.4314 fax http://aggiegaijin.blogspot.com/ ; Secretary Section L, History & Philosophy of ScienceAmerican Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)www.aaas.org