Hardware vs Simh

Unlikely. For some purposes, I would too. For other purposes, nothing but the real hardware will do. There are many. Their relative importance depends on the person, and in many cases the task as well. you are mostly interested in factors which lead to choosing real hardware over an emulator, rather than the other way around. As you point out, an emulator is usually preferable from a purely software point of view - faster, better internal visibility, easier to fix bugs, etc. (Not always, though; while I haven't run into it with DEC hardware, I did see a case where a faster machine was substantially less useful: a game which depended on hardware speed for timing - running on a faster generation of hardware, it was unplayably fast.) There are at least two reasons that come to mind immediately. One is hardware compatability. If you have a device whose host interface consists of some half-dozen Unibus slots with custom backplane wiring (I used such a thing back in the '80s), emulators, in general, just don't cut it. (In principle there's no reason they couldn't. But if anyone makes a bridge allowing use of Qbus - or Unibus, or Sbus, or etc - hardware on a more modern system, I really want to know about it....) The other is emotional attachment. Personally, for example, I have a great fondness for the VAX, especially the MicroVAX-II, because I went through my larval phase on the VAX and, in particular, did a lot of low-level hackery on MicroVAX-IIs - I am one of the (apparently-)few people that have actually worked with KA630/KA620 multiprocessor uV2 machines, and, what's more, without just running stock DEC software (eg, VAXELN) on them. This doesn't mean I always insist on real hardware; indeed, I'm working on a KA-630 emulator right now. Others have mentioned other things, most of which strike me as at least partially overlapping with the "emotional attachment" reason, but not always/entirely. I suspect that this list concentrates people to whom the emotional factors are particularly relevant. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B