24 Jan
2012
24 Jan
'12
6:36 p.m.
On 01/24/2012 08:08 PM, Ethan Dicks wrote:
Hence the older 486 pizza box, a K2/450 I ran NT4 on and a 386sx25
mini format board that works but I haven't tossed for some odd reason.
They still exist mostly as they can take the ISA cards like IEEE-488,
National process IO cards, or simple bus level interfaces.
They are all utility boards/boxes. One of the 486s runs boards to do eprom
programming, another board for logic analyser, and that sort of stuff.
Since they are useful they exist otherwise they would be in PC junk heaven.
On Tue, Jan 24, 2012 at 7:40 PM, Jules Richardson
<jules.richardson99 at gmail.com> wrote:
Same here. PCs are meh! I have several 486/dx66 but they only exist as
they
can run old bus cards and that is useful but not for historical reasons.
Sam Onella wrote:
I concur. Eventually we'll all be
kicking ourselves for not hanging on the Xeon and 2000 based
electronics.
I don't agree there; Hardware-wise, there's nothing interesting about
modern PCs. I really
can't
Agreed but I do have one oddity of the DOS era, a Tandy HX1000 because
it's odd mostly and useless.
see myself looking back in ten or fifteen years
and wishing I had one.
Perhaps there will be certain, specific models that are for
some
reason interesting, but 99%? Nope.
They don't even have ports any more that
are really useful to me (unlike serial / parallel / SCSI etc. on ones of the
80s and 90s) where I can easily twiddle bits and "do stuff" if I want.
There's where I do keep a few machines around - I do twiddle stuff
that needs real serial ports (110 bps anyone?) and real parallel ports
(bit-banged devices hung off of "printer" ports) and SCSI.
So... old and semi-boring, but not exactly
interchangable with "new"
gear. In a sense, it's taking desktop hardware and making an embedded
project out of it, so that _adds_ interest.
The biggest reason for having old PCs is to run old hardware that can't
plug into the new and may not be available in USB or whatever port
is there now.
Compared to every other computer I have PCs have been expendable
and like a hacksaw blades mostly useless when they are too slow
or so unsupported by reasonable OSs that are useful.
PCs to me fall out as they have mostly broken the 10year rule.
While in 10 years they have gotten faster and cheaper they have
generally gotten no more interesting save for being tools. They
have gotten so much more complex that understanding one
completely is pointless as the standards they are based on are
likely in the class of, lagging the implementation, if you can get
them. That and if you can buy the machine its already obsolete
and the software barely fully uses its features yet.
Then there is software. DOS was really all there was , then win3.1, or OS2,
then the win9x and NT and finally I got off that wagon for Linux. At
least
linux still has the same command line as my PDP11 running unix V6
and oddly it's useful still.
In short PCs are not fun.
Allison