25 Jan
2012
25 Jan
'12
1:08 a.m.
On Tue, Jan 24, 2012 at 7:40 PM, Jules Richardson
<jules.richardson99 at gmail.com> wrote:
Sam Onella wrote:
I concur.
Eventually we'll all be
kicking ourselves for not hanging on the Xeon and 2000 based
electronics.
I don't agree there; my guess is that "current" tech of the
future will
nearly always have some form of emulation/VM software available to allow the
PC software of today to run
Yep. We are largely there already.
Hardware-wise, there's nothing interesting about
modern PCs. I really can't
see myself looking back in ten or fifteen years and wishing I had one.
Perhaps there will be certain, specific models that are for some
reason interesting, but 99%? Nope.
There's just nothing 'cool' about them, no
nostalgia value; they're just
beige boxes that crunch numbers.
True, anymore.
They don't even have ports any more that
are really useful to me (unlike serial / parallel / SCSI etc. on ones of the
80s and 90s) where I can easily twiddle bits and "do stuff" if I want.
There's where I do keep a few machines around - I do twiddle stuff
that needs real serial ports (110 bps anyone?) and real parallel ports
(bit-banged devices hung off of "printer" ports) and SCSI.
Sure, I bet there are some niche bits of hardware out
there that are pretty
neat and worth saving - but the 'commodity' stuff is just boring, will
always be boring, and for the foreseeable future will be succeeded by
machines that are just faster versions of the boring hardware of today.
I'm in a mild conundrum about a piece I ran across while cleaning up
just last night. I dug out some flavor of slow Pentium-1 board, slow
enough it has a heat sink, not a fan, and while the board is plenty
fast enough for a dedicated purpose I'd like to put it to (Daphne
engine to run Dragon's Lair and Space Ace), unfortunately, some time
in the past, the NiCd battery leaked and I removed it. The damage
must have been not visible at the time, but there sure are damaged
traces now. I can't imagine spending a lot of time on a Socket 5
board to get it to work, OTOH, all the "recent" hardware wants massive
heat sinks, fans, lacks ports, etc. So I doubt I'l put much effort
into repairing a Socket 5 board with an SiS chipset, but I could use a
pre-1999 board to take its place.
So... old and semi-boring, but not exactly interchangable with "new"
gear. In a sense, it's taking desktop hardware and making an embedded
project out of it, so that _adds_ interest.
-ethan