25 Jun
2011
25 Jun
'11
11:06 a.m.
On 6/24/11 3:34 PM, William Donzelli wrote:
> Pretty much all Spheres were prototypes - NONE of them worked properly
> out of the box (or as a bag of parts), and they ALL had to spend time
> with a thick ECO list.
>
> They were crap, plain and simple.
\\Perhaps youcould list the (vrey few) classic computers that you
actually approve of.
Yeah, but you say that about everything! ;)
I learnt, on about the second day of existance of this list, that saying
a particular machine [1] was 'crap' with no more explation was a waste of
time and liabl to start long-running flamewars. Saying that a machine was
crap, or poorly designed, or... _because_ it had race hazards everywhere,
or the power supply was margine, or it was liable to overheat, or the
backplane connectors were prone to developing poor contacts, or that
active-high edge-triggered interrupts are insane, or ... can create a
sensibel discussion.
And of course what one person considers 'crap' might well be an
interesting, if marginal, design to somebody else.
[1] I made the big mistake of criticising a machine that has a fanaticval
followijng. Suffice it to say that it's 6502-based, dates from the
late-ish 1970s, and has colour graphics. I sitll don't like the video
system., the I/O system, the disk controller, the marginal PSU, etc, but...
-tony