Hardware Hobbyists vs. Emulator Jockeys (was: Re: UNIX V7)

As an aside, the HP9830 is one of my favourites. It's got a claim to being the first personal computer (I think it was the first all-in-one machine you could just put on a desk, plug into the mains and start typing BASIC). It's also one of the few bit-serial machines you're likely to come across. Repairing them is interesting, Most parts, the exceptions being the HP custom ROMa and the Intel 1103 DRAMs are easy to find. But being a bit-serial machine, tracing the fault is hard without a logic analyser (I speak from experience having repaired several 9810s, a 9820 and a 9830). How on earth did that happen? Not normally, alas. Although I was given my first 'scope. Of course it didn't work, but it came with a schematic, and used nice simple components like valves,, so finding the open-circuit resistor in the timebase unit was not too hard (even though I'd never done much electronic repair before). I suspect it would be a lot harder to fix a broken PC... I won't argue with that. But then hobbies don't hae to be cheap. Certainly my other hobbies involve quite expensive equipment (if bought new). And just what do you think I am typing this on? It's a real IBM5170 (albeit the 8MHz version) with a 486 kludgeboard in the 80286 CPU socket running an ancient version of linux. I've done all sorts of hardware mods to it, piggybacked chips, kludgwires eerywhere. Apart from the hard drive, I have scheamtics for everything in that box... No, but it probably wouldn't mind :-) Except it's not. It's not going to last as long as the sort of tools and instruments I normally buy. Yes, older HPs are well-built and often well designed (although I am not convinced the HP120 is a particularly good design for a CP/M box). I feel the peiod from about 1965 to 9185 was the 'glory days of HP' when they had some wonderful products. If I can get stuff from that period, I do.. Well, there are some HP machines that are hard to find...... I know, I'm looking for them. -tony