29 Jun
2007
29 Jun
'07
1:11 p.m.
On 29/06/07, Chris M <chrism3667 at yahoo.com> wrote:
Er, right.
immediately
What's irrelevant to the thread may not be irrelevant
to all discussion on this list. And most of what you
mentioned in the preceding is seemingly too new to be
relevant at all.
SystemPros are too new? They're nearly 20y ago!
Please forward it.
I did, in a follow-up message.
There's a version of it here:
http://www.search.com/reference/Non-PC_compatible_x86_computers
?. I wasn't the one discarding anything. It just
follows that if talk of pcish/dosish stuff is
off-topic due to it's uninterestingishness, other
*uninteresting* topics would by necessity follow. Now,
I don't find talk of Trs-dos/CP/M uninteresting. If I
had, I'd simply ignore it, and keep my trap shut.
The thread - which I think has been a pretty successful, wide-ranging
discussion; I've certainly found it very entertaining - was about
weird and unusual /computers/ in general. Not micros, not PCs. I
submit that by the standards of diversity that the world's seen in the
last 70-odd years of computing, the PC is a very vanilla machine
indeed. Indeed, it's arguably /the/ most vanilla, because it is
probably the single architecture with the largest number of OSs, the
largest number of apps, the largest number of individual units, the
largest number of users and the largest number of 3rd-party binary and
plug-compatible versions. The PC is, I suspect, the baseline, that to
which all others ultimately will be compared. It is the very
/definition/ of the "ordinary computer".
--
Liam Proven ? Blog, homepage &c: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lproven at gmail.com
Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884 ? Fax: + 44 870-9151419
AOL/AIM/iChat: liamproven at aol.com ? MSN/Messenger: lproven at hotmail.com
Yahoo: liamproven at yahoo.co.uk ? Skype: liamproven ? ICQ: 73187508
--- Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote:
It's one thing to run *a* program, quite another to
run *all*. *The* PC and Apples, Commodores, etc.
actually share a few if you've never noticed.
I don't follow. I know of no single binary that'll run on all of them,
except in a VM of some form, such as the UCSD p-System or the Infocom
runtime.
> --- Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com>
wrote:
So the
criteria for uninteresting has become whether or
not
it can run a particular program/s?
It's one. If it runs all the programs from PCs, it's
a PC. Congratulations on your promotion as spokesperson
for
all of us.
Oh, come /on./ Even the spinoff thread on rare & interesting PC
compatibles has been marked as offtopic!
I'm
curious as to why you're becoming so exercised
over this?
I haven't even broken a sweat. If you're wondering
why I reply to such rhetoric, dunno, guess it kills
the day. > About
> the only time a PC
> compatible is interesting in architectural or
design
> terms is if it's
> something like a BBC Master 512 - a 2nd
processor in
> an alien computer
> connected over a CPU-to-CPU bus. Thus, there's
some
interest
in
hardware PC cards for the various Macs, in the
add-in boards for the
Acorn RISC PC (I have one here, if I ever get it
working) and so
forth.
What about dual or triple processor machines that
just happent to have an 80x86? Are they deemed uninteresting? It seems that some boxes
w/an
Intel processor can often be some of the rarest
pieces
around. I can give you a list if you like and
challenge you to find 2 or 3 others on this list
with
one, sometimes their won't even be another
single
person.
Depends. A Compaq SystemPro (really early SMP PC) is
still a PC, it's
just a PC that could do interesting things running
Unix. A Sequent
multi-proc server isn't a PC, 'cos it won't run PC
OSs or apps, so
it's marginally more interesting, but it's still
relatively mainstream
compared to some of the exotica that people have
been suggesting here.
So would a Sun 386i be. The problem is when people utter those words
it's
really indicative of a unit with an 80x86.
Not really, no. I've seen lots of non-PC-compatible
x86 kit; I even
wrote an article about it for Wikipedia before some
little idiot
deleted it, which I'm not happy about. Linux? We seem to be diving off topic there. And
I'll
grant there are many OS' more interesting
then
DOS.
But if you're rendering all DOS based
machines
uninteresting, you may as well throw CP/M, TRS-DOS
and
a number of others in with it. Remember this is
a
vintage forum. If you want real *interesting*
stuff,
you'd typicall fare better somewhere else,
interesting
typically signifying cutting-edge.
Why would you discard pre-PC machines? You're
throwing the baby out
with the bathwater. Ancestors of PCs need not be PCs
themselves.