[personal] Re: Stanford's PDP-6 ( was Re: Hardware Hobbyists vs. EmulatorJockeys)

On 19 Jun 2009 at 12:01, William Donzelli wrote: Let me also add, as others have said, that hindsight is 20-20. The 1960s and 1970s were a time of huge upheaval in the computing business. Consider just the decade between 1964 and 1974--from the introduction of the IBM System/360 to the introduction of the MITS Altair. By about 1980, the scrapyards were awash in obsolete big iron. Who wanted it or could even say what was worth preserving? Would any of the list members now take it on themselves to accumulate all of the Pentium I PCs that they could get their hands on? How about CRT monitors? Yet I'll wager that in 30 years, those things will be sought after eagerly by collectors. For my part, today I'm taking a fixed-frequency HP workstation monitor down to the recyclers. It's a nice unit, but it's large and heavy and an LCD gives a better display. No point to keeping it at all. --Chuck