With the assistance of a cultural grant from the Royal Australian Historical Society in 2024, the ACMS has been working to restore and image a collection of DEC tapes left by founding member Max Burnet.
Max Burnet graduated from Melbourne University with a Bachelor of Science (Honours) in electronics in 1962. He then spent four years as a Scientific Officer at the Weapons Research Establishment in South Australia.
He joined Digital Equipment Corporation Australia in 1967, and spent 31 years with them, to become the longest serving employee in Australia.
For twenty years he managed Digital’s user society, DECUS, which had up to 5000 loyal members.
During his time at Digital, he collected a museum of all the early DEC computers and was known around the company as “Museum Max”.
When the ACMS was formed, the DEC machines became part of our collection and are still proudly displayed at our Croydon headquarters.
Max was a fastidious record keeper, and left behind a trove of documents detailing his work, research and home life. Many of these records were committed to magnetic tape formats that are now obsolete and require specialised equipment to read. With the help of our talented volunteers and the RAHS, we’ve been able to check these tapes and begin extracting the recorded data.
We’ve already recovered many files from the first batch of tapes, and as we continue to refine our processes for correcting read errors and magnetic degradation, we hope to accelerate our work over the next year!
Below: A brief extract from a 1993 speech by Max
Some comments on restoration philosophy
When you see people happily driving round in
a 25 year old HQ Holden car you have to wonder
why a 25 year old computer cannot still be happily
working?
A computer of any vintage has few moving
parts, and if it was well designed initially, there is
no reason why it should not last for a very long
time.
To achieve the goal of having working operating
systems, it is usually easiest to restore the last
(most recent) in the family. This is an example of
BURNET’s theorem, first postulated in 1979:-
THE SOFTWARE BECOMES PERFECT AS
THE HARDWARE BECOMES OBSOLETE.
It is nice to be offered a "working" unit for the
museum, but it is a sad fact that when we receive
such a computer for the museum, any damage will
have been done on the day it was turned off. Items
have been souvenired, cables cut, etc. The rule for
the curator is BE THERE THE DAY IT IS
TURNED OFF.
In renovating an old computer, the major task
is to ensure all the pieces are present. Very rarely
will an faulty piece of gear be found. It is always
missing modules, switch settings, cables swapped
over that cause the problems. The only perishable
that the curator has found is the foam rubber used
for filters
This leads to BURNET’s second theorm of
1985:-
ANY OLD COMPUTER CAN BE FIXED SO
LONG AS YOU HAVE THREE OF THEM.