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shrubbleyesterday at 4:37 AM1 replyview on HN

I will stick my oar in for the Large Scale Systems Museum just north of Pittsburgh, PA, in New Kensington (which is where the modern aluminum smelting process was invented), with their simple website at https://www.mact.io/ .

They have DEC PDP11 and VAX, SGI, Sun, IBM mainframe and midrange, Data General (apparently the same terminal setup as used in Severance), a Cray J90, etc. And it all works and you can sit down and type on the systems. If you want to take the 45 minutes it takes to boot an IBM mainframe - you can do it. I know some of the people there, they are top-notch restorers and know the hardware and software very well.


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kev009yesterday at 5:55 AM

LSSM is really top notch. It's grass roots, done by volunteers that want to preserve and share experience with these machines.

Most museums, I'll pick on CHM as an example but it applies to basically any metropolitan museum: by contrast are quite sterile, you can tell they have a ton of money but it's the standard impressive architecture and displays setup that is designed to ferry large groups through relatively quickly but don't impart much wisdom on the participants.

I never got a chance to visit Living Computer Museum but I wonder if that met some kind of high funding to be able to service masses while still going deep hands on.

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