[personal] Re: Stanford's PDP-6 ( was Re: Hardware Hobbyists vs. EmulatorJockeys)

[Chuck Guzis]

On 19 Jun 2009 at 12:01, William Donzelli wrote:

> And then the scrapper comes in with MONEY...and drives away with the
> machine.

Let me also add, as others have said, that hindsight is 20-20.  

The 1960s and 1970s were a time of huge upheaval in the computing 
business.  Consider just the decade between 1964 and 1974--from the 
introduction of the IBM System/360 to the introduction of the MITS 
Altair.

By  about 1980, the scrapyards were awash in obsolete big iron.  Who 
wanted it or could even say what was worth preserving?  Would any of 
the list members now take it on themselves to accumulate all of the 
Pentium I PCs that they could get their hands on?  How about CRT 
monitors?

Yet I'll wager that in 30 years, those things will be sought after 
eagerly by collectors.  

For my part, today I'm taking a fixed-frequency HP workstation 
monitor down to the recyclers.  It's a nice unit, but it's large and 
heavy and an LCD gives a better display.  No point to keeping it at 
all.

--Chuck