6 Nov
2008
6 Nov
'08
11:13 a.m.
(It'd be interesting to do a poll on how many
systems each of us here has, and
how many hours a year each of those systems actually gets run for - I suspect
the results would be quite disturbing!)
I suspect I have over 200 machines. Some are simple home micros, others
are reasonably well-specified minicomputer systems.
I do collect peripherals as well as CPUs. To take a trivial example (and
it's not rare, it's certainly not a 'holy grail', I spent some time a
couple of years back restoring an HP7245A printer/plotter (a thermal
hard-copy device that can both print dot-matrix characters and plot
vectors). I had to make up alignment tools and so on. I found that as
interesting and the design as beautiful; as many CPUs.
As regards running time, I tend to concentrate on one particular machine
(or closely-related family), get it working, and then move on to
somethign else or go back to a machine I've worked on previously. So in a
given year, some machine will get run for ocnsiderable periods, some
might not be turned on at all.
-tony