[GreenKeys] Take our Teletypes!

[Jim Haynes]

I'd just like to put in a good word for the Seattle museum and for
Sarah Autumn.  The museum is fabulous, has working exhibits of the
Step by Step, Panel, #1 crossbar and #5 crossbar switches, all in
two floors of a telephone company building, and the telephone company
supplies 48VDC to run their stuff.  Heaven help us if the telephone
company ever decides to evict them!  I was pleased to see that most
of the people working there are young to middle aged, so their knowledge
of this technology will not soon die with them.  Sarah is more or less
the curator of the Teletype section of the museum, and is doing a nice
job of getting things showable and working.  Every museum (short of
what somebody has privately in a barn) has to limit what it takes in
to things that are in line with its objectives and its available space.

Yes, if we're going to donate our stuff, we'd like to see it go where
it will be appreciated.  I think places like the Seattle museum and
the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA are better destinations
than corporate-sponsored museums.  I remember the company that bought the
Western Union name was going to have a museum, but as soon as the man
behind it retired the whole concept went away.  And seems like Western
Electric-Lucent was going to start a museum at one time and maybe 
collected some artifacts before the corporate honchos decided they
were not going to support it.  The Teletype Corp. museum almost went
to the dump, but a couple of managers got permission to try to find
homes for the artifacts and were able to distribute them among a large
number of museums.

And then it's a fact that the kind of heavy metal we collect is
extremely expensive to ship.