16 Jun
2004
16 Jun
'04
10:28 a.m.
Thank Gawd for that.
Unix *IS*
user-friendly, it's just picky about who it calls a friend ;)
I'm thinking of several ways to avoid this becoming a windows support area.
I'm not hip on windows being a valid topic here, or commodity clone PC's for
a lot of reasons. Key of which is that in my opinion, that system is
responsible for the decline of the true art of computer science (but albeit
the rise of giant computer industry). The systems, and in general a lot of
the software after that are so cookie-cutter as to not have any soul. While
faster, cheaper, etc... there are no really new ideas in them. Just
reapplication of age old concepts. It's the period when these age old
concepts were discovered, put forth, and formed that we really seek to
preserve.
Agreed.
I am primarily a hardware person, but I guess much of the below applies
to classic software too but I am not qualified to comment on that.
I am somewhat unusual (I won't say unique because I know there's at least
one other person here who does this) in that I pull classic computers
apart (non-destructively !). Really apart, and then investigate what I
can see. If there are no schematics, well I produce a set 99% of the
time.
And much of the time, when I'm working on a classic, I discover something
which I consider beautiful, or at least interesting for the time. Some
optimisation, either to increase performance with the technology then
available (e.g. in the PDP11/45), or to reduce component count (e.g. the
fact that the HP9810 uses half as many RAM chips as you might expect) or....
I _don't_ get this feeling when I look inside a PC. Any PC.
One can make a good case for the initial home PC market - c64, apple, exidy,
atari, trs80, etc... as being historically significant. One simply can't
Please don't forget Acorn (and I suppose I'd better mention Sinclair and
Amstrad, although their machines are not in the same class as Acorn...)
make that argument for later generic clone PC's.
In my mind, most of us here wish to preserve the ART of computer science,
One of the oldest computer preservation groups in the world (18 years old
now), although founded by a hardware hacker, has the aim of 'preserving
old computers, software and operating practices as far as possible'. Yes,
there's a lot more that needs to be preserved other than boards of chips
(or trasnsistors, or valves, or...)
not necessarily machines of a specific age - thus I
think an age limit isn't
really a great way to do this. Also, I think IBM 5150's are on topic for
example. It's a nebulous thing to pin down. Easy to understand but hard to
express.
I don't think any of us started collecting with the first idea being "I'm
going to collect systems that are 10 years old". We aimed for specific
Actually I started because I realised that unless _somebody_ started
preserving these old machines then 30 years of history was going to get
lost. And rather than simply say that, I started grabbing all I could
find. Particularly minicomputers.
-tony