30 Jan
2005
30 Jan
'05
7:47 a.m.
Tony Duell wrote:
Please don't take this as a flame, but I am always
suprised by the people
who run classic computers (as opposed to running emulators) and who don't
want to get into the hardware. To me [1] that's one of the reasons for
running an old machine.
Trust me, I don't take it as a flame, we just have different area's
of interest. My area of interest is primarily in the Operating
Systems that
run on the various platforms, and I'm coming to the
conclusion that I'm better served by emulators in most cases. I'd
really like to dig in and learn the hardware on my PDP-8's, and even
the -11's at a very low level, but I simply do not have the time.
Well, while I doubt I could write an OS from scratch (or a compiler,
or...), I have been known to read source listings, make (small) changes,
and so on. If you turn that round, while I don't think everyone needs to
know how to _design_ a CPU (or whatever), it's helpful if you have some
idea how they work, and how to find faults, etc...
Of course there is the big difference that correctly working hardware can
fail (a component can go out-of-spec), correctly working software
doesn't. But anyway...