new to the list

Victor the Cleaner said... |I'm new in these parts, having been referred to the list during a quest |for some (very) old Data I/O programming equipment. ``I can't imagine why you'd want one. After all, [personal preference here]'' But so what? |I can't imagine why you'd want one. Doug pretty well covered my reasons. But beyond that, the ones I used never broke. They just didn't. Oh, they glitched out occasionally, and you had to reboot, but what didn't? For that matter, today, what Micro-based OS (besides BSD and Linux) won't? But so what? |One of the worst excuses for a roll-yer-own switcher |I've ever seen, and nonexistent development software. Development software? DEVELOPMENT SOFTWARE??? The OS was a BASIC with disk commmands, like most fo the other usable micros at the time. What development software? You boot. You type. It did cool stuff. [As opposed to everything that had development tools, which let you do big projects, but often took a week to get to the point that you had anything moving around the screen in an interesting fashion.] *That's* the way to get kids interested in graphics programming. If I can't get a Compucolor, I'll offer to buy my Mom's Mac ][, but I'd much rather have the Compucolor. (I suppose I could go dig the Sinclair out of the unopened boxes from three moves back...) [I thought the floppies were 8", not 5 1/4"...] |Words of advice: |If you want to learn graphics, go track down an SGI Indigo - the purple |cube. They're down in the couple-of-hundred-bucks zone now, and one of |the most elegantly built machines I've touched in almost 25 years in the |biz. No, I want my *kids* to explore their interest in graphics, and in programming. And I just want to play. Meanwhile, if someone wants to give me a decent line on a functioning Indigo for two hundred bucks, I won't argue with that, either. |On the subject of home-supers,... ``I can't imagine why you'd want one.'' [OK, so I'm lying, now!] I'd love a Cyber, esp. if I could get ahold of Ga. Tech's heavily modified operating system. -Miles, who'd love a VAX, too, but turned down a free 780 a few years ago because he didn't have the budget to get 3 phase power and A/C in his basement, and who later wished he'd gotten it, anyway. [Hmmm. I wonder of V the C is trying to scare us off the Compucolor market so he can corner it. 8^P ]