So my father is a packrat of the highest degree. As he and my mother are considering a location change after many, many, many, many years in the Washington, DC area, my mother has been slowly making him clean up and throw away all his stuff. And this is a lot of stuff - my sibs and I joke that either this stuff would act as an excellent fire log or it's too densely packed to allow oxygen in to let a fire burn...

Anyway, while he has agreed to throw away old magazines and bills/receipts from the '60's and the '70's (I kid you not), the big stumbling block is his collection of every computer he's ever owned. And being an avid adapter of new technology, this is a very large collection. While some of the newer ones could easily be donated to local charities for people to use as simple e-mail and word processing stations, the REALLY old ones are more problematic. We're talking about an original IBM PC with not one but two 5 1/4" disk drives (we were soooo cool - we could leave the DOS disk in A: and put a second disk in B: to save our BASIC applications...), 80/88's with tiny monochrome screens in big housings - stuff like that.

He really doesn't want to throw them away, and despite his facility with computers he's not comfortable with EBay (being NYC born, he's inherently cynical and untrusting when dealing with strangers and money). So does anyone know of any institutions or organizations that would like to have these machines? I know as a former volunteer at the Smithsonian that they have far too much crap in their collections than they could ever curate, so I was wondering if there was some sort of specialized museum that would take them.

Thanks for any help!