Thursday, 8/28/2019
Drove to the east bay to the Yosemite ave warehouse for a day of “curatorial review”. Toni and I went through five boxes of artifacts, verifying the number, noting condition, adding notes to the database records. We found several items that hadn’t been photographed or had been photographed poorly, and passed those to Bud and Sherman who were doing photography.
This might sound boring but it had its moments. One came when we were looking at a large circuit board. Its database record description basically said “PCB board”, plus the usual dimensions and other details that we always note. But what was it, actually?
I knew from its appearance that it was an S-100 bus board, because I had owned and worked with many of them in the CP/M era, roughly 1976-1980. It had two ZIF (zero insertion force) sockets with handwritten labels in marker, 2708 and 2716, which I was pretty sure were EPROM chips. So, it’s an EPROM programming board. All I had to do was type the maker name and a couple of words more, “Solid state music s-100 programmer” into a search and there it was complete with a photograph of the identical board and even a link to the original manual! So we could enter a much more informative description and that URL into the database entry for that artifact.
This is the kind of thing that us old-fart museum volunteers can do almost without thinking, but would be hard for anyone else.
Back to C.H. to clear my email and get a quick supper, and then off to the Pear Theater to see a production of Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband. The cast did it quite well and it was fairly enjoyable.
Codgerville 