Thats probably my biggest complaint about CHM, is they have no living displays - thats what I love so much about the LCM in Seattle, its all living, breathing tech, that you can touch.
When did that happen? When I was living in the bay area, I'd visit every few months, and they always had scheduled demos of some of the big equipment. Hell, you could see the Babbage engine running every weekend.
But, they also had a working PDP-1 with Space War that you could play, demonstrated and described by some of the people who'd built some of the original software and the game itself.
Admittedly, most of the equipment was display-only, but I think that's reasonabe...given the cost and effort to restore even one such device of that complexity, in an era when parts have to be scavenged from NOS or from donor machines or built from scratch using spotty design docs, it's entirely reasonable to focus on the devices that are either of notable significance (the first of a thing, or whatever), or things that the most expertise is readily available for (a lot of the docents and people who work/volunteer at CHM are computing pioneers, usually with a history of working with specific devices).
I love CHM, and think they do a great job, and have always really enjoyed my visits. I used to drag every visitor I had out to the CHM even if they had no interest in computers. Most people still enjoyed it. There's something wonderful about seeing the scale and intricacy of early computers.
