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Repair vs Preservation

falter

falter

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Just for general discussion purposes. You have a very rare machine in your collection. Its provenance is well documented, it has made appearances in magazines and has been mostly untouched since its owner passed 40 years ago. It doesn't work and has tons of 'patina'. Do you restore it, knowing to do so involves substantial disassembly and potentially undoing some of the original owners' work? Or do you preserve it as is so it can go unmolested to a museum or something one day?

I'm thinking of this Mark-8 I have.. which will require extensive restoration work and probably will involve some breakage given how brittle everything is.
 
The term patina seems to be thrown around alot lately. I watch alot of "will it run" style videos and these guys are driving around in a rust heap because they like the "patina". My take is simple. Repair to full functionality then get it cleaned up and looking "good". Sometimes that can just take a thorough cleaning. Sometimes that calls for paint, new hardware/fasteners/cables/etc.

If its rusty.. well that can be addressed.. Leaving it that way.. Just seems gross to me.

Thats my 2 cents
 
My personal view is to get it working for posterity - providing it is 'sympathetic' to the era.

The original builder/owner would (I am sure) approve...

A static display that looks like a piece of cr*p in a museum is never even going to get displayed (unless it is worth mega-bucks)...

That's my 2 pence...

Dave
 
I'm fine with "patina", within reason, and I'm particularly adverse to "de-upgrading" systems in an attempt to make them look factory fresh while ruining their function (the poster children for this is the "Original 128k Macintosh" crowd that insists on "restoring" machines that were upgraded to 512k, despite the fact that doing so leaves you with a doorstop that can't even run the demo Steve Jobs introduced the computer with), but leaving something *broken*... no. If I wanted a dusty broken thing that's only suitable for keeping in a glass box I'd collect fossils or Etruscan pottery.
 
' Patina ' Bah!, I'm fine with a bit of age related 'Wear and tear' but there is a limit, Rust is Rust and i wouldn't give it floor space in my home, The old banger i drive around in has loads of 'Patina' but i don't care about that so much.
 
If anything involves potential breakage, I leave it alone. I've had a couple disasters that still haunt me. I do my half-assed best to get it working, but don't want to do anything that might make it worse.

Of course I clean everything and make it as neat as possible without causing damage to paints or finish - I don't find vintage filth appealing. ("..it's the original owner's real vomit - and those fur balls are from his first cat!!1")
 
Mr.Amiga500 said:
- I don't find vintage filth appealing. ("..it's the original owner's real vomit - and those fur balls are from his first cat!!1")
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Yeah. That about sums it up......


Honestly this is reminding me of a video I watched a couple days back.

The guys does everything except fully dismantle the thing which would have been a real timer saver and gotten ALL the muck out. But worst off when hes done hes talking about gutting it to make "A New PC Build".... Just horrible.
 
For sure, when I say “Patina” I mean scratched paint or yellow plastic (Retrobrite is a tool of the devil in the wrong hands), not the original 80’s VINTAGE cheeto dust or whatever weird garage lichen grew all over it in the years it spent at Jones’ Big A** Truck Rental and Storage. Clean the darn thing at least.
 
Dirt and grime can irritate my sinuses or otherwise make me sick. The first thing I do when I get a system is take it apart and give it a bath. I don't necessarily need to make something look "new", but if there are rusted spots, I might sand and paint in order to keep it from corroding more.

But I tend to use my stuff, and none of it will be on display in a museum. (although I use some of it for VCF SE).

I guess if something is of historical significance, you might need to be mindful of any specific elements that help present its history. For example, if there were hand written labels on it, or some special configuration.

But clean that SOB and make it something people might want to look at. :)
 
I ALWAYS start with a good clean and go from there. I might do more to after evaluating it it or pull it down for other projects/spares.
 
It's kind of tricky to draw a line under what's patina vs plain old damage. I struggled with that a lot when I had vintage cars. I'm an originalist, so if a car has faded but original paint and worn but original seats, etc, I tend to favor leaving it alone. Partly because it's still the original thing, however faded, but also because the wear and tear tells the story of those who had it before me. Otherwise if it's been heavily changed over the years, I don't mind doing things to make it more usable. Depends on how much original is left. A side note about major restoration: the trouble with, say, a frame off restoration is you never quite get it 100% to drive or look like the original. You can't replicate factory processes in your garage. My friend who is in restoration went so far as to say unless you've rode in an untouched original vintage car, you've not rode in the 'real' thing.

Hobbyist computers are similar for me. Most of the time I don't know who the owner was, how many hands it passed through to get to me, so it's not such a big deal to take it apart and try to restore it. But for something like this Mark-8 or the TVT.. I have a name and even a face of someone who (as far as I can discern) passed long ago, and these are particularly special because he built them by hand. Everything I change I kind of erase him a little bit. I know it probably sounds weird - but I'm an historian more than tech buff. Grant can't tell the story of these machines, but they kind of can. The TVT I have no problem working on - the boards were all tossed inside the case and have bounced around.. no sense leaving them like that. The Mark-8 *has* been repaired at some point.. the last slot actually broke in half and I can see where someone (Grant?) glued it back together. But otherwise it's pretty much as he left it, I think.

Maybe I'm being a little more emotional than I should be, given my Dad's recent passing... just like the idea that something like these kind of gives a kind of life to its owner again - keeps their name alive.
 
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Btw this is Grant Runyan - who taught at Santa Barbara Highschool as a math teacher from roughly 1956 to 1976, built the two machines I have and even led an early hobbyist club in Santa Barbara that refused to take on an official name like the Homebrew Computer Club.
 

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I absolutely love the fact you have the history behind this Mark-8. That really adds a lot to the machine and I can understand why you might be hesitant to do any work on the machine. I was in a slightly different position with my own Mark-8 as I don't know the history behind it (Was sold on Ebay by an estate sale vulture who didn't know (Or didn't want to tell) about where it came from) This made it a lot easier to go ahead and do some repair work to get the machine working again. Preserving items is all well and good but I do feel it's nice to have a working system to show younger generations how this stuff actually worked.
 
Thinking about it some more. Maybe you should just buy another. That way you can have the unbuilt system, the historical system and an everyday driver :)
 
falter said:
It's kind of tricky to draw a line under what's patina vs plain old damage. I struggled with that a lot when I had vintage cars. I'm an originalist, so if a car has faded but original paint and worn but original seats, etc, I tend to favor leaving it alone. Partly because it's still the original thing, however faded, but also because the wear and tear tells the story of those who had it before me. Otherwise if it's been heavily changed over the years, I don't mind doing things to make it more usable. Depends on how much original is left. A side note about major restoration: the trouble with, say, a frame off restoration is you never quite get it 100% to drive or look like the original. You can't replicate factory processes in your garage. My friend who is in restoration went so far as to say unless you've rode in an untouched original vintage car, you've not rode in the 'real' thing.

Hobbyist computers are similar for me. Most of the time I don't know who the owner was, how many hands it passed through to get to me, so it's not such a big deal to take it apart and try to restore it. But for something like this Mark-8 or the TVT.. I have a name and even a face of someone who (as far as I can discern) passed long ago, and these are particularly special because he built them by hand. Everything I change I kind of erase him a little bit. I know it probably sounds weird - but I'm an historian more than tech buff. Grant can't tell the story of these machines, but they kind of can. The TVT I have no problem working on - the boards were all tossed inside the case and have bounced around.. no sense leaving them like that. The Mark-8 *has* been repaired at some point.. the last slot actually broke in half and I can see where someone (Grant?) glued it back together. But otherwise it's pretty much as he left it, I think.

Maybe I'm being a little more emotional than I should be, given my Dad's recent passing... just like the idea that something like these kind of gives a kind of life to its owner again - keeps their name alive.
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I understand your dilemma, and think if I were in the same position I would have a difficult time doing anything beyond cleaning and securing the computer so it will survive the years to come, but that being said I think if you would really love to get it up and running I think you should do so but make it into a lengthy video, sort a documentary about the builder and the actual computer followed by a detailed documentation of it's restoration. I think that will give you pretty much everything that you want accept for "the museum getting the unaltered Mark 8 someday" thing, and that comes to my last thought on this. If you preserved the computer as it is and donated it to a museum at some point there is a very good chance that it would never be exhibited and would spend it's life in the Indiana Jones warehouse for all eternity and so going "the restoration documentary" route is probably better than the "preserved for a museum someday" route.
 
falter said:
Btw this is Grant Runyan - who taught at Santa Barbara Highschool as a math teacher from roughly 1956 to 1976, built the two machines I have and even led an early hobbyist club in Santa Barbara that refused to take on an official name like the Homebrew Computer Club.
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One last thought. I think if Mr. Runyan were still with us he would most definitely tell you to restore it and use it, especially if, as I suggested, you do a documentary about him, the machine and its restoration.
 
Moonferret said:
Thinking about it some more. Maybe you should just buy another. That way you can have the unbuilt system, the historical system and an everyday driver :)
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I was actually thinking of going that route.. although with bills (kids college stuff) mounting I've been thinking again about selling the unbuilt boards. Still mulling that over.

I actually did start building a 'new' Mark-8 from the plans. I collected a whole ton of vintage parts including an MIL and Godbout G8008, ceramic and plastic 1101s, MILES of soldercon sockets, etc. I used that vintage Taylorclad stock that was being sold on ebay for a while and remade each board. I was working on drilling it but stopped when I ran into issues with the dremel lifting some of the pads off the board. I actually wanted to build that one into an example of a 'digital group packet #1' machine, with all the mods Dr. Suding made available, including his TVT. I've seen a couple of examples of that out there and they look really neat, and also make for a more functional machine.
 
mountainking said:
One last thought. I think if Mr. Runyan were still with us he would most definitely tell you to restore it and use it, especially if, as I suggested, you do a documentary about him, the machine and its restoration.
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That would certainly immortalize him wouldn't it. I will do something like that I think, although I struggle with repair videos because unlike Adrian Black, I'm not really skilled at repairing electronics (I really struggle with understanding the how and why sometimes). But yeah, that'd be a nice way to keep his name out there. Wish I knew the story of how these machines ended up getting dumped off. Crazy to think Grant is my great grandparents' age. Doesn't seem like that long ago there were lots of people from that generation around.. now they're almost all gone.
 
Moonferret said:
I absolutely love the fact you have the history behind this Mark-8. That really adds a lot to the machine and I can understand why you might be hesitant to do any work on the machine. I was in a slightly different position with my own Mark-8 as I don't know the history behind it (Was sold on Ebay by an estate sale vulture who didn't know (Or didn't want to tell) about where it came from) This made it a lot easier to go ahead and do some repair work to get the machine working again. Preserving items is all well and good but I do feel it's nice to have a working system to show younger generations how this stuff actually worked.
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Yeah it's a lot easier to work on something where provenance is unknown, and you may be the third, fourth or fiftieth owner whose hands its fallen into. If you can't say with at least some authority it's as its original owner built it, you can't really feel bad messing about with it.
 
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