Starting up a computer museum

[Marqsaynt]

*Marqsaynt rubs his jaw*

Jeez... try to help some people. Is it my fault that old Commodore 8032-SK would look awesome as a lizard terrarium?

On a "serious" note though, I'm sure a lot of people/organizations locally have old computers sitting around in their basements and would probably love to find someone to take them off their hands (even better if it's someone that actually appreciates the machines). The main problem is just how does the person that wants the computers and the people that want to get rid of them find each other? In the US we have "craigslist" I'm sure there must be some free classifieds service similar where you live... the occasional look at the "free" section may turn up a few under-appreciated old comps and a "Have an old computer collecting dust? Online computer museum always looking for donations!" ad may also get some responses from people looking to clear out a little closet space.

And of course, be sure to talk about it to anyone that will listen... You'd be surprised how many friends of friends will go "Oh, hey! I have an old computer-y thing... it's broken though, the screen only displays in green. Want it?"

You may be doing all this already but, if not, it could be a nice way to grow your collection at very minimal cost.   

[Elvicat]

I've gone and translated the pages to swedish now too so you who speak swedish might understand the stuff beter but i bet there's mistakes here and there
Updated some computers with more info but as the info for most of my things are limited it's really hard to find.
Happy browsing

[Rigwyn]

A hyperlink from your site to another site has some value to it.
The higher your pagerank the more valuable that like becomes.

Offer a link to the donor's site in exchange for an old computer.
Hell, a link doesn't cost you anything but page space - offer a few if needed.

At work we pay to have people take our old computers if we cannot sell them. You cannot just dump them in the garbage ( at least your not supposed to for environmental reasons )

[Elvicat]

um is that main menu so hard to look at that you can't find links?

* Elvicat is confused

[Rigwyn]

Huh ?

No, I was saying that when people try to get more search engine hits on their website they will often ask operators of other websites to link to their site.

Google 's  ranks pages based a number of factors. One of which is popularity.  (look up pagerank )
People looking to increase ther pagerank will often as others to link to their site ( one way link )
This elevates their pagerank slightly. how much depends on how high the refering site's pagerank is.

Pagerank is one of the factors that determines how close of a match your site is to the keywords that are entered,
Yahoo does something similar as I understand.

Now unless your getting a lot of traffic your pagerank will be low and that link from your site will not be worth much, but its something. Likewise, the computer that you are asking for in return is not worth much either. Chances are its worth less than the cost of shipping it.

Just an idea, thats all.

[Elvicat]

well heh i think google has accessed me allready for some unknown reason, i was searching for some information once and the site poped up

[LigH]

The Google Pagerank algorithm is mysterious. It is based on "links from others to the site", but not only. The "amount of useful information" is also relevant, but hard to determine. "Reference links from the site to others" might play a small role too. And furthermore, the "uniqueness" is another factor.

Possibly the most efforts are spent to remove "link farms" from the pageranking (sites with no unique relevant information, often just copies of original pages - but heaps of links among the own site(s) trying to push the pagerank by crosslinking only). Therefore, excessive linking can be counterproductive even!

[Tirion]

Wish i could help but i don't know anything about old computers

[Elvicat]

i know this post is old but i thought i'd revive it
the museum is getting bigger and bigger and now it even has a comment/feedback page

[Elvicat]

Added an animation on the content area of the page, hopefully it got a even more oldschool feel to it 

[LigH]

Cute.

Do you know Uwe Sieber? Authentic nostalgy for Fixedsys. The Far Manager works perfectly well with this one.

[Soloyos]

Nice collection and site. 

[Elvicat]

Ligh i didn't use a dos box when i did that animation, i copied it directly from a old dos pc that sits beside me heh

[LigH]

I mean you could have used not Arial while making this animated GIF, but another font.

There are even TrueType fonts with "text mode" look&feel, if your graphic program requires those. Not all can work with bitmap fonts.

[verden]

The width cartridges are from a compugraphic typesetting system most probably. Width probably referred to character and spacing widths and were addon features because the width tables were always getting updated for font changes. That's my educated guess. Probably from the early 1980s.