To all with interest in IBM 7090

In article <CANij+dfh3JbQYmsWqPbN5pTOhcjYyr12O2MxDczGJNk1GcC+bQ at mail.gmail.com>, William Donzelli <wdonzelli at gmail.com> writes: For "hands on" experiences, that ultimately means that every exhibit will degrade into some sort of replica. However, as component density increases (i.e. custom VLSI chips), it becomes problematic to make a replica. How am I going to make a replica of an SGI workstation when the circuitry inside the VLSI geometry engine chips isn't documented? It's too complex to treat it like a PAL and "dump" it's behavior. It's unlikely that the internal design documents (schematics) will ever be made public; I would not be surprised to find NVIDIA or ATI/AMD willing to lay claim to some of the IP buried in there after patent transfer from the original SGI. And that's just for a well known, large-ish company where such documents may even still exist, what about a smaller concern that's long since out of business? Sure we can preserve the physical hardware as a manufactured item, but the actual design of its internals may be inscrutable forever. Well, at least until the singularity let's us reverse engineer circuit diagrams from chips. The imaging of 6502 and SID chips yielding an executable simulation of the chip is probably the route that we'll have to take. We'll end up with an executable simulation, but still be lacking in design documents. -- "The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" free book <http://tinyurl.com/d3d-pipeline> The Computer Graphics Museum <http://computergraphicsmuseum.org> The Terminals Wiki <http://terminals.classiccmp.org> Legalize Adulthood! (my blog) <http://legalizeadulthood.wordpress.com>