9 Jun
2006
9 Jun
'06
4:33 p.m.
Lots of sites seem to do the "single photo of the
machine" thing. A small
subset add some history information (and to be fair, do it well). Very few
sites offer the resources to help maintain these machines, though.
It'd be interesting to know what percentage of people reach a site as casual
browsers, and what percentage do so because they actually own an example of
something that's referenced on the site. I suspect that the latter is a lot
higher than might be thought.
Wheneever I get a new toy, I always do a google seach for the model
mumber (in all sane variations...). Most of the time, alas, I find little
of use -- virtually all the sites contain a picture and maybe a limited
specification that I mostly know anyway (and which, alas, is often
incorrect!).
A good example is the Panasonic/Quasar HHC. There are many sites showing
a picture of the front of the machine. I have not found one site that
gives useful technical information (like a pinout of the bus connector,
schematics, memory maps, etc) or has software to download.
> Anyway, the beauty of a classic computer is in the PCBs, not the case :-)
Which reminds me. At least one of the sites that covers the HP9830 (I
think it's hpmuseum.org) shows one of the boards. The board chosen is the
BASIC ROM board. OK, it looks pretty (with 28 seramic packaged chips with
gold pins), but it's really a very boring board :-).
Well, some have nice cases. Some have very nice (or at
least interesting)
engineering in the chassis. But yeah, I hear ya.
True enough. So lets have pictures of the case, pictures of the
mechanical construction, pictures of the boards, and so on.
-tony