Vintage Computers in the Digital Age
The computer museum we have built, The Museum of Applied Computer Technology, or MACT, is located in downtown New Kensington, Pennsylvania. We have operational computer systems from small desktop machines that date back to the early 80's that many of the 40's crowd grew up with, to scientific research machines from MIT that the first Artificial Intelligence programs were written on, to some rather obscure machines from the 50's and everything in between. Kids in particular have shown a great fondness and almost instant understanding of the vintage machines, and seeing where today’s' technology grew from sparks so many more ideas, creativity, and curiosity that we feel it is imperative to continue to showcase these systems while today’s' kids have a bit more freedom with their downtime to explore and understand the world they are living in, and the one they will one day be able to create.
My team and I are wanting to find a away to keep the public involved and able to explore the vintage computer museum we have built over the past several years. With the recent events, we have had to stop offering tours to the public in person but are wanting to still share what we have to offer. We are planning to do mini tours of the museums many historically important computer systems via shareable videos.
While adhering to the state mandated social distancing, we will still be able to do rundowns of how the machines operate, do walk-throughs of the booting process, running code, and answer questions about the machines histories.