Tony Duell wrote:
A case in point. I know a museum which has a
straight-8. They are missing
2 flip-chip cards from it. I happen to have a box full of boards pulled
from a straight-8 (no, the chassis was not around when I got to grab the
cards, and no I wasn't involved in pulling them). I offered said museum
the 2 cards they needed, free of charge. They didn't want them because
the date code stamped on the board was 2 years too late.
A few points
3) The machine in question was not an original
obtained from DEC and
never used. It was a machine that had been used for many years before
being donated to the museum. What's the betting that some flip-chip cards
were replaced while the machine was in use?
Did you suggest that they check the date code on all the other cards ;-)
>are expensive and hard to find, and the fact that a
screwup during operation
>could actually destroy one of the few remaining examples (or only one). Most
I doubt it would destroy the machine in the sense that
it could no longer
be used as an exhibit, or indeed that it could no longer be restored
again. In that sense, a machine that had been restored and then failed
during the museum demonstration is no different to a machine that's never
been restored.
An makes the demonstration closer to real life when machines DID break
down. I even imagine demonstrations of engineers fixing and testing the
machines, a regular occurrence. Today you simply go aout an buy a new
one :-(
Are you seriously implying that the internals of a
fairly modern computer
and one made, perhaps, 30 years ago are significantly different? Because
I find them to be very similar...
They ARE entiely the same, the difference is that to see that
resemblance you need to run the machine. The museum s stance of showing
only statc display accentuates only the differences without explaining
the similarities.
>different today, how can people relate to this?
While there are still a few
>people who know how to make a horseshoe at a blacksmiths there will be
>nobody who knows how to run the early mainframes in 50 years, things are
Rubbish!. Are you seriously trying to tell me that
these skills can't be
learnt? I would claim that anybody who _truely_ understood a modern
machine would have no problems on an older one. The fact that very few
people understand modern computers is the problem, not that the older
machines are so different.
Precisely! and I see the older machines as offering a path towards
better understanding.
-- hbp