24 Apr
2002
24 Apr
'02
3:34 p.m.
As I've said before, I think not, since the building was the enclosure for
those systems that had external racks for some of their hardware. I've never
maintained that the drives had to be in the same box, but only that the
interface did. I think if you look at the way the market diverged and later
converged again, with, in some cases, several separately powered boxes, in
others, multiple boxes powered from the host, it's pretty clear that some
systems were intended to be brought into the household bit-by-bit as one could
afford them or as one realized he couldn't do without them. The difference
was that you needed, generally to keep an interface in the cardcage with the
CPU, more or less. In those systems that extended their I/O via channels in
separate racks, I hardly think there's any confusion about who the intended
user was or what the purpose was.
Lots of folks made a computer out of an Atari box that originally came into
the house as a video toy for the kids. Lots of computers were used to play
games. The boundaries aren't really clear. However, in general, if it came
with a hard disk inside, it probably wasn't a video game.
Dick
----- Original Message -----
From: "Tony Duell" <ard(a)p850ug1.demon.co.uk>
To: <classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org>
Sent: Wednesday, April 24, 2002 4:48 PM
Subject: Re: Micro$oft Biz'droid Lusers (was: OT email response format)
> An easy way to spot a product intended for the
toy market as opposed to
one
intended to be
seen as a computer, is that the disk drive interface is
external.
So by your (as ever, broken) defintion, the PDP11, PDP8, Philips P800
series, etc are all 'intended for the toy market'? This is getting
totally stupid.
What about the HP71? This is a pocket computer (that can take up to 512K
of memory (ROM + RAM) and which has a very nice built-in BASIC with
optional FORTH and Assembler) with an _optional_ HPIL interface module.
You cna add a disk drive, digital tape drive, RS232 port, HPIB port,
parallel port, video display, A4 plotter, inkjet printer, etc, etc, etc
(all at the same time I might add). It's also one of the few pocket
computers where you can interlink half a dozen of them and transfer files
between them (yes, there's a proper filing system with named files for
data in the machine's RAM). But as the disk drive is external and the
interface a plug-in cartridge, presumably it's 'intended for the toy
market' ?
-tony