6 Nov
2008
6 Nov
'08
5:47 a.m.
Antonio Carlini wrote:
Jules Richardson wrote:
Oh, anything. Cancelled projects are just as fascinating - it's really
interesting seeing where the designers were going in their thinking at a
particular moment in time.
Interesting question. Are we limited to
production machines? For me,
prototypes actually seem to hold more interest - it's fascinating to
see how a prototype evolved into a final product (or how bits of it
were re-used in other products), or to see from the various hardware
hacks which bits the designers were having trouble making work.
Is that just prototypes that made it out of the door in some form
or other or any prototypes at all, including cancelled projects? I have various
boards that were various projects that went nowehere. I have even
more documents for project that never got as far as hardware!
Me too - and there's a subset there in terms of clone projects by third-party
companies which were then pounced on by legal departments; some of those can
be rather interesting (and in some cases the clones never got as far as being
announced / marketed, so google etc. doesn't even turn up any evidence that
they existed, even though in some cases they made it to real hardware).
Scouring any 'internal' media salvaged from some of these companies can
produce a real goldmine of information which otherwise would end up being
forgotten about.
the first pass cards had all the bits on them
(although
not all necessarily glued on the right way by the factory!).
Heh. I've seen some boards where they've even done things like make a 50-way
IDC socket out of bits of two other sockets - you can just imagine hardware
guys working late into the night to get something running for a demo the next
day, and having to lash something up because they didn't have the right part :-)
Perhaps protos that don't quite make it out of the
door ("the market has
moved on, this'll never sell") are more interesting.
Yep, that too. It's hard to make such items 'useful' of course, they're
more
for curiosity value than anything - but as I hinted at earlier, I suspect the
majority of us actually run very little of what's in our collections anyway.
cheers
Jules