Xerox Alto on ebay (not mine!)

[Tony Duell]

> > My experience suggests that few museums would dismantle a rare machine to
> > produce documetnation and then fix it, whereas quite a few enthusiasts
> > would. Giving a very rarew machine to such an enthusiast is more likely
> > to produce inforamtion of benefit to the rest of the classic computing
> > community than would be produced if it was given to a museum.
> > -tony
> 
> I don't understand that logic. What you want is a collector that will tinker 
> with an item and modify it so he can print "hello world" on the screen or 

Whre did I say anything about modifying it?

> printer a few times until he gets bored with it, blows it up and cannot fix 
> it, or dies and it gets trashed. A museum will collect all the information 

Why do you assume that enthusiasts are going to blow things up, or be 
unable to fix them?

> about that rare device and keep it intact until some later generation has 
> the need or desire to see what made it tick. The key difference is each time 

There are several problems with this : 

1) The information my not exist, at least not publically. If you need to 
reverse-engineer a scheamtic, it's a lot easier to do so from a machine 
that's basically working. 

2) ICs fail even if they are not powered up. We all know about bit-rot in 
EPROMs, but other ICs fail in storage too. It may well be that a machine, 
however carefulkly it has been stored, will not be available to later 
genarations.

> that rarity passes hands to another collector things get lost and you have 

Why? If the 2 collectors involved know what they are doing, then nothing 
will be lost.

-tony