The final 'Garage' sale...

> Jim; > As I read your email a profound sadness overcomes.... I guess this hobby > (moreso, to people like us) can very easily become all-consuming both > financially and psychologically. I, and I am quite sure others on the

> definitely feel and share your pain. Several times since getting into

> hobby I have been to the point of just giving up, feeling that required > items for a particular system are simply never to be found again. Or

> a particular piece and not being able to swing the cash at the time. Or > putting the family through grief when I stay up till the wee hours for

> on end trying to get something working. Or wondering how on earth I'm

> to get a piece that I have obtained transported. Or storage once it > arrives... well, I'm sure everyone here can identify. So far,

> every time I've hit that point I've been able to overcome it - either

Jerome Fine replies: I am very much in agreement with your response. Since I originally required real PDP-11 hardware to run the RT-11 programs, I was also concerned with finding enough hardware at a reasonable price to support my addiction. For myself however, my real collection is software. Thus there is absolutely no value there at all from hobby users. All I can do is copy the programs to a CD and then beg people to use them. I also understand about taking off some time and coming back to working with the things which are so challenging. Over the two decades that I have working with RT-11 on my own, I have made a few enhancements that I have found extremely useful just for my own requirements. > It royally sucks to me that many of us (probably not me, but many here > anyways) have extremely important ranges of computing history - and that > without us, they will NOT survive from what I can see, at least as a > representative range of systems. Most museums simply don't care, or want

> represent the whole of computing history. That is something that is so > central to our culture, the very fabric of our current daily lives. I'm

> talking about a classic "straight 8", or a DG nova - these will likely

> represented. But the entire gamut that we have (most of us) lived

> from the DECs to the altair and apples and heathkits up to, yes... I'll

> it... modern PC's. Pick any one of them, and unless they were in the

> tier of name recognition I don't think they will be around in museums -

> exidy sorcerer for example - unless we preserve them. Future generations > must know that it wasn't just the Apple and IBM PC. It is this very > degeneration of view into "years ago people used apples and PC's" that

> wrong, given that the whole progress was possible because of VARIED

I agree that the competition was probably useful to allow so many different ideas to be tested. However, I suspect that most people on the classiccmp list tend to focus almost totally on the hardware - whereas I am of the opinion that the software is equally important. Note that I do agree that the hardware is essential as well, but I don't agree when the software is only used for showing that the hardware is working. Indeed, in my opinion, while the marriage of the hardware and software to produce the final result is dependent on both parts, the software can often make up for the areas where the hardware is deficient - at least in the short run. And more recently, it would seen that using an emulator to run PDP-11 instructions is no longer self-defeating, at least from my point of view, especially after DEC stopped further enhancement of the PDP-11. Being able to run RT-11 on a 3.6 GHz Pentium 4 under Ersatz-11 at 75 times the speed of a real DEC PDP-11/93 is hardly something to sneeze at. And that is just the start of the advantage of using Ersatz-11 under Windows 98 SE on a Pentium 4 system. Being able to have up to 12 "jobs" running at the same time and switching from one job to another at the touch of one keystroke on the same monitor (which can't be done on a real DEC PDP-11) let alone the speed of the output which is NOT restricted by a serial line running at 19,200 baud (sometimes it is actually TOO fast) is just another advantage. But I digress. The key point is, as you have stated, that almost every museum rarely have dynamic displays, let alone take the trouble to fix bugs in old code. And enhancements are totally out of the question. And as for saving the old versions of the OS, well if the system is not running, who cares. And the final problem is that the OS is never able to handle future dates - VMS on Alpha excepted. That problem I hope to resolve for RT-11 by making V05.03 both Y2K/Y10K compliant - perhaps even by the end of 2003 when the DATE value on older RT-11 distributions actually breaks. Since V05.07 of RT-11 is now able to handle dates until 2099, I intend to provide code which is compatible with V05.07 until 2099 after which I am hoping that changes made to V05.03 will also be incorporated in V05.07 to allow both versions to continue to be used for the foreseeable future. > To bring in another thread that's been going on on the list... I am also > very concerned that many of these systems need to be preserved NOW,

> than later with regards to the ability to repair them. Yes, new (young) > people can be trained in basic TTL repair and troubleshooting. But I

> see a lot of that going on, or at least, not enough to make sure that a

That preservation aspect probably applies to software as well. I am also concerned that old versions of RT-11 will be lost. My goal is to copy as many of the old distributions of RT-11 up to V05.03 along with layered products to a CD so that they can be used by hobby users under the Supnik emulator. Since the code is in "C", it should be possible to continue to use the Supnik emulator for a very long time. > Long story short, I am very concerned with the trend. I wish I had

> Jim, I sincerely hope that you manage to at least hold onto a system or

> and can stay active on this list. I'm sure we all empathize and wish you

> very best, as well as sincerely thank you for your past participation

Likewise. I know that I will also need to dispose of 95% of my PDP-11 hardware - and since no one seems to want it, probably Dan Cohoe will end up with all of it if no one else is interested in sharing it. Sincerely yours, Jerome Fine -- If you attempted to send a reply and the original e-mail address has been discontinued due a high volume of junk e-mail, then the semi-permanent e-mail address can be obtained by replacing the four characters preceding the 'at' with the four digits of the current year.