Is the Living Computer Museum dead?
As a long term collector of old PC hardware, software and games, it&#x27;s becoming pretty obvious that keeping aging hardware around has a very tangible expiration date to it. We are only able to keep this tech going because a lot of it was mass produced and we can find replacement parts, but we&#x27;re already seeing massive failure in parts which render a device unusable regardless of how many blown capacitors or resistors we change.<p>There comes a point when the only way to keep this stuff running is either through manufacturing replacement parts (prohibitingly expensive) or through emulation. Emulation is cheap but completely unrepresentative of the original experience. For example, you can&#x27;t emulate different displays properly. As anyone who enjoyed the Vectrex&#x27;s beautiful vector graphics will agree, you simply cannot emulate this on a modern display. The bright phosphorus coating with the smooth analog beam is not reproducible on something like LCD.<p>So, I still collect this stuff and enjoy it. But I have given up my ambition for hardware preservation. It will take an organization much better funded than me to keep this stuff alive in the long term. And even then, I suspect a lot of it is going to be lost to time in the coming decades.