= VerdeBinario = !VerdeBinario is a cultural association born in December 2002 and located in southern Italy, in the town of Cosenza. The name "verdebinario" means literally "green bits", since our interest is focussed on the relationship between environment and technology. Since its early days, the association is working on two main projects, both involving retired IT hardware retrieval and restore. Our first project, "Interactive museum of IT archaeology", is a permanent exhibit of historical computers, including mainframes, old PCs and videogame consoles. Visitors are welcome to interact with all the working machines experiencing the feel of old systems, softwares and interfaces. The exhibit includes many machines, ranging from big VAXen to early Apple PCs, UNIX workstations, old IBM PC clones and vintage videogame consoles. The museum is actually hosted in our own home, but we are hopefully moving it in a larger place in the future.We are already accepting visitor whenever the space is open to the public (see below). Guided tours are also available at a small contribution fee (3 EU) and by email reservation (museo*AT*verdebinario*DOT*org). While looking for vintage hardware for the exhibit we immediately noticed that many people were throwing away newer and hardware, mainly assembled x86 machines with no historical interest, but in good working order. Quickly, a "Trashware" project started. We take all the PCs we can and take them to our labs. Small hardware repairs and/or upgrades, cleaning, and open source software bring them back to life and set them ready again for use. We give all the PCs we restore to anyone who needs it at a very small fee, for covering the retrieval and work costs - usually from 30 to 50 EU - and for contributing with verdebinario's activities. We used some of this stuff ourselves mainly for the lab and for office use. We've set up a small free internet point in our place, with 100% recycled hardware and 100% free software :) Aside with our two main projects we promote cultural, educational and social events and hacker attitude. We are open for sure every * Wednesday: 16-22 / Thursday: 19-21 / Saturday: 16-20 ---- CategoryTeam