Do you know what? I think I've finally reached my "It's off-topic"
saturation point. Not the amount of off-topic content, but the amount
of moaning about things being off-topic.
I'm gettign that way too...
I'm pretty much infinitely more interested in Laserdisc players than I
am on bloody memory cards for PCs. We've had a lengthy spiel about what
kind of ISA card you can use to bring a PC-XT up to 640k, with barely a
murmur about how on- or off-topic it might be. Now we get something
that's vaguely interesting and not mass-market commodity PC bits, and
it's somehow off-topic?
I guess I'm a bit like you here. I like oddball technology. When it comes
to computers, I like things like a calculator with no ALU or even an
adder. A calculator with a bit-serial CPU. A soft-microcoded workstation
processor. A 32016-based workstation with a bit-serial gtraphics
processor that was acvtually slower than doing the operations on the
32016. A home computer with both a Z80 and a 6809 inside. That sort of
thing.
And to go off-topic, my favourite cars are Citroens. I still like V2000
video recorders (dynamic track following :-)). I still use film cameras,
I collect the oddballs, like SLRs where the mirror forms part of the
shutter, like the bug-turned-into-a-feature Peestor reflex shutter (darn
it, my cat is called Pentina :-)). I love the old HP test instruments,
like a frequency counter that has a BCD counter, latch and display driver
built from 8 transistors (and no ICs).
So yes, laserdisk players are _much_ more interesting to me than PCs...
The thing is, though, this is Jay's list, and he gets to say what goes on
here. And by the accepted rules of this list, a PC/XT is a classic
computer (yes, I have difficulty with that too). So add-ons for it are
on-topic, whereas much fo what you and I (and apparently other list
members) are interested in is not.
-tony