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Living Museum of Dead Computers

Many years ago, I began to accumulate old computer hardware that was lying around or being discarded from Morrill Science Center at UMass Amherst. I think my first real acquisition was when someone threw out a PDP-11. It was just sitting on the Geosciences loading dock. This was probably in 1998 or 1999. It was a whole rack with a nice plastic sign with the old DEC lettering. The PDP-11 itself was just something like a 2U box with some huge 4U floppy drives below it. Someone had pasted on a little paper sign on it that said, "Please GOD, Keep it Running!" I rescued the PDP-11 and the little plastic sign and tucked them into the back of the BCRC. Then, little by little, other things began to arrive.

I contributed my Powerbook 100, which was one of the first real laptops. I found some old Model 100 TRS-80s someone was throwing out and rescued them. Al Woodhull contributed a Model 15 teletype and a DECScope. Tom Hoogendyk added an early Macintosh. Brett Longworth had rescued a NeXT Cube. Joe Kunkel had an old Apple II. Willie Bemis added an original IBM PC. Someone found an old adding machine. Chris Woodcock contributed a wafer of 386 microprocessors. Little by little, the collection grew.

George Drake contributed a lot of stuff. He had a block of old core memory and some big old hard-drives. Someone mentioned that George had actually *made* computers -- in particular, word processors -- that many people in the department had used prior to IBM PCs. I was able to get a keyboard (in a wood case), but all of the CPUs had already been lost -- a great loss to history.

I think it was Sean Werle It was Rodger Gwiazdowski who added an old cracked slate tablet, like kids in the 1800s used for lessons, that he had inscribed with the words "Your new information technology may become obsolete." I also found some old Leroy Lettering Guides, which John Roberts had left behind.

All this stuff had been just hanging around in the old BCRC, but without a real place for it. When we began making plans for the new BCRC, I pleaded for a display case where the stuff could actually be seen and appreciated. The display case finally came in and I'm now trying to move stuff in.

It's wonderful that it finally has a home where people can see it. There's still a lot of work to get it curated and make some signage so people can understand what they're looking it. But it gives me a real thrill every time I walk by it. Thanks to everyone who's helped make it possible!