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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

It's hard to keep collections of large objects going. I have too many Teletype machines. An entire telephone museum was auctioned off lately. The Museum of Communications in Seattle is only open Sunday from 10 am to 3:00 pm. And just try to find a home for a Linotype.

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There just isn't enough demand from the public to require monuments be built to house this stuff. Sad as that may seem I'm hoping virtual reality helps future generations appreciate the stuff of bygone eras.

It will be difficult to appreciate the full sensory range of stuff from bygone eras without touch/pressure and smell to accompany the VR reconstructions. I hope researchers and VR companies can perfect these as fast follow-on feature enhancements to VR environments.

Mind you, you don't usually get to touch or smell museum pieces, either. Glass cases and all.

Good luck recreating the tactile feel of a model 33 Teletype's keys, or the smell of a Linotype's pot of molten lead.

Well maybe not enough demand for physical monuments, but we can build a virtual one right now without the need for VR on my site:

http://www.theymadethat.com/things/iua/teletype-model-28

So what this offers over other mediums is a more standardized, visual context:

- It shows different variants / versions of the Teletype Model 28

- It also shows Teletype models that precede it as well as models that succeed it

- It can also show all of the parts of a Teletype Model 28 (assuming we have the data)

- It can also show all of the people involved with the Model 28 (sadly I can't find this... yet)

Let me know if there's anything that we're missing in terms of capturing history.

In NH usa there is an Arcade called "fun spot" which got non-profit status to preserve arcade machines. Its not polished but it has games and all are playable. The non-profit status helps. It seems a bit of a struggle to keep some of these running parts being harder to find.

http://www.classicarcademuseum.org/gamelist.htm

I learned about Funspot from King of Kong. Great to see them still making it. Hopefully the parts situation gets resolved.

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