18 Mar
1997
18 Mar
'97
6:38 a.m.
On Tue, 18 Mar 1997 HamiJohn(a)aol.com wrote:
In the few days this group has been going, I have been
taken down memory lane
over and over again!
Yeah, this is a lot of fun, and I'm surprised with the amount of traffic.
I would like to propose that we begin documenting all
the great classic
computers of the past. I suggest it be a SIMPLE compilation such as:
Name/Model
Manufacturer
Date released/stopped
RAM/ROM included
Languages included
Ports included
Peripherals offerred
etc.
Actually, I started something like this on my own two or three years ago,
using a format I found in an old Computing Now! magazine from 1983 that
had a (VERY basic) roundup of ... 40 systems or so? (I can't verify this
as I'm sitting at a terminal in the university, not at home with all my
stuff.) I started collecting info on any machine I could get info about,
and I was putting it all into an AmigaGuide document. It was sorted by
company and sometimes by series as well. Unfortunately, there was tons
of unverifiable data in this list and I never got around to entering a
lot of the stuff I *could* verify. I also wanted to collect pictures of
the systems and link them in, but I don't have a scanner and its hard to
find pictures of a lot of these things.
I haven't touched that list in ages. I'm not even sure where I stored it
now. :) I ran out of time for this kind of thing, and after a while I
realized that I could get a lot of the info I was typing in off the net
(for the more common systems) and basically gave up.
If I were doing it now, I think I'd just grab peoples' web pages and link
them together into a huge local document. Probably eat up a good portion
of a zip disk.
I was typing up reviews from magazines, too.
I tried to list my sources so that I could go back later to see where the
wrong info came from. :)
I had to read between the lines a lot.
Of course the exact categories need to be decided by
discussion on this mail
list.
And somebody would need to tabulate the info (then publish the list monthly).
Finally, an "expert" committee for those items "in dispute"!
Well ... what do you think?
I think it's a damn fine idea. It would be great to have a resource like
that available, and it would be fun to construct it.
John Hamilton
hamijohn(a)aol.com
"Old computers never die, they just fade away bit by bit!"
Doug Spence
ds_spenc(a)alcor.concordia.ca