Entry No.127

IT Writers Awards

A little way down the road from the Sydney Olympics site at Homebush, just around the corner from a famous old rail bridge painted in Arnott's colours, is a relic of Sydney's industrial age past. Back in the heyday of vinyl records, the EMI plant that's used as a Kennards storage facility stamped out thousands of 12 and 7-inch disks every day, and served as a regional manufacturing hub for EMI and HMV radio and television products.

Although the gantries and tracks used by EMI workers are long silent, its guillotine-doored industrial lift (said to be among the most powerful in Sydney) is still used for moving people and heavy equipment between floors. It's also used to transport bulky items to a huge loft space hidden up inside the building.

This loft space, lit softly with mote-scattered sunlight and still boasting its original overhead tracks and vintage inspection certificates, is, like the building, another link with the past. Squirreled away inside this space, subsidised by Kennards thanks to the ongoing interest of its founder, sits thousands of old computers, documents, programs and technology miscellany.

The loft space contains part of the Australian Historical Computer Society's collection of vintage and veteran computing devices, some of which date back to the early part of the 20th century. But the loft is more than just a storage space. It's also a clubhouse, a clearing house for the collection and a "shed away from the shed" for six core members of the AHCS. In other words, they like to spend their Saturday afternoons organising and fossicking and, appropriately, having a beer or two with like-minded friends.

Go on a walk and in one corner you'll spot a lurid orange '60s-vintage Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) PDP 9, a mini-computer that helped to democratise computing power by bringing it out of the glass rooms where mainframes lived and into education departments and faculties where staff and students could gain easy access. Just across the corridor from the PDP, past a Kaypro "luggable" and adjacent to yet more PDPs, is an Apple Lisa, the ill-fated machine that begat the Macintosh but was so expensive and unsuccessful that it nearly brought Apple to its knees. (It wasnít to be the last time that was to happen.)

The Lisa, named after Apple co-founder Steve Jobsí daughter, was so spectacularly unsuccessful that Apple was left with a stockpile of thousands of the unsellable machines. And, because Apple disposed of the stockpile by taking the simple expedient of piling them up and bulldozing them into a ditch somewhere in the Californian desert, they're now rare and highly prized by collectors.

Max Burnet, ex-managing director of DEC in Australia and a 30-year veteran of the Australian IT industry, is the AHCS' most active, organised and publicly minded member. He has been collecting since 1970, not long after he realised computers had a value outside of simply being business or scientific calculating machines.

"Back in the '70s, many customers were starting to upgrade their minicomputers," says the ebullient 58-year-old. "As I was at DEC, I decided to start trading them in, a scheme that quickly became known as Max's Creative Trade-ins! We amassed quite a collection of old machines, and when Compaq took over DEC two years ago, and I decided to leave, I managed to buy the entire collection two days before the handover for the sum of $1."

Burnet is proud of his collection. Some of the machines work, some could if they were fixed, but a large percentage will never run again. Often the reason is because theyíre incomplete, bits having been souvenired when the computer was decommissioned. When someone offers Burnet a computer, he makes sure heís in the room to see it switched off. ìItís the only way of making sure that you get the whole machine.î

Thereís a less prosaic reason for some of the machines not running, and it has nothing to do with vandalism. Unlike their modern-day progeny, old computers are usually made of discrete components wired together in a point-to-point fashion. This made it easy to replace bits that failed in service, something that often happened in computing's primordial days in the early '60s.

Some components, especially capacitors (a device capable of rapidly storing and discharging an electrical current), are chemical-based and degrade with time. It is not always possible to replace them with identical parts because the parts arenít made any more. New-old stock (that is, original unused stock) isn't an option either because it will have undergone a similar degradation.

ìThis makes for considerable debate, not only among our members but among the computer collecting community as a whole,î Burnet says. Some people feel replacing anything in the computer is tantamount to destroying the fabric of the machine. Burnet, on the other hand, thinks that if itís possible to replace an old capacitor with a new one, even if it doesnít look the part, thatís okay.

ìIíd rather see the machine running and doing what it was designed to do, but not everyone agrees with me,î he says. ìThe Powerhouse [Museum in Sydney], which we have a very good relationship with, would never [alter] the machine because they want to be able to show, in 500 years' time, what the machine looked like in its original state.

ìOf course, thereís an easy answer to that problem - just get two of the machines, get one running, and keep the other original!î

Itís not the goal of the AHCS to eventually put together a museum and invite the public to take a look. Burnet says he would rather leave that to an organisation with the experience of dealing with the public and putting on exhibitions - such as the Powerhouse, for example, whose curator of computers and mathematics, Matthew Connell, has a close relationship with the AHCS.

Connellís approach to collecting and exhibiting computers and related material is, not surprisingly, quite different from hobbyist collectors. ìMax intuitively gets what computers mean on a broader level. He has a good sense of the historical importance of these machines, and he knows aliens didnít just land one day, give Bill Gates the PC and fly off again,î says Connell. ìBut heís not typical of all collectors. There is a large number of people who just collect for nostalgic reasons, or they might fetishise one particular machine and just collect it and nothing else.î

Connell is curator of the Universal Machine exhibit, a permanent display devoted to helping people understand the context of computers, and through that help them to understand their own and others' relationships to machines and computers. ìThere are many people who think computers started with Apple, or with the PC in the '80s, but when they come [in] they remember they used to work on a mainframe, or they knew someone who did,î Connell says. ìThe exhibition also helps them develop an awareness and appreciation of the skill that was required to run some of these old machines, machines that had to be programmed by the user before they could be used for anything!î

Although the Powerhouse wouldnít compromise the fabric of the machine in order to get it running, Burnetís position - that having a machine running is better than having it static - is more than just fetishist posturing. ìIn the past, businesses have thrown away the computer and kept the data,î he says. ìWhat happens is theyíve got all this information sitting around, either in a format they can no longer read, or on a media type they canít access, and then they discover they need to get to it somehow.î

Itís called the dead-media problem, and itís a growing issue for businesses of all sizes. Burnet has a sideline business, helping companies extract this information. ìIt might take a day or so to get the equipment up and running, and then we extract the data and archive it onto a CD-ROM, which has an expected life of around a century.î

Whether itís the DEC PDP, which resembles a realised vision from a future we never quite had, or the iconic heft of an early all-in-one Apple Macintosh, or the Wellsian tripod of an early hard-disk drive mounted on insulating columns, these machines are fabulous objects that deserve to be preserved. And thereís no more fitting place for that to happen than under the gantries of an old record factory, a place where the death of the industrial age and the birth of the information age meet.

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