Full immersion emulation

Having experienced both 1980s computer rooms and passing kidney stones, I would like to offer my opinion that visiting a noisy computer room is something quite fun to do at least once, while one could skip the experience of passing kidney stones entirely without any regrets. In my experience, visiting a computer room was enjoyable, while hanging out there for a full shift got rather tedious. The computer room I worked in at UCI had an enclosed, glassed-in office for the computer operator that provided a nice retreat from the noise between tape swaps and printer handling tasks. I also fondly remember that warm spot behind the Convex C240 power supply cabinet exhausts, which was the warmest spot in the room when the main Computer Science building AC kicked in at 6AM and the computer room temperature plummeted for a while. For some reason, I fondly remember the scream of a DEC TU77 drive, and would like to have one in my collection. Clearly, I must be somewhat touched in the head. :) -- Mark J. Blair, NF6X <nf6x at nf6x.net> http://www.nf6x.net/