12 Dec
2008
12 Dec
'08
3:59 p.m.
That's one
reason I insist on being able to support
everything I depend on myself (meaning that I have schematics, source
code, etc).
Admirable, but unrealistic, in my opinion. Systems today have gotten so
the necessary
program from scratch. A trivial example. I had to convert
some ROM dumps from one format to another. There may be a program that
does just what I want if I give it the right options. But by the time
I've found the program, worked out what those options are, etc, I might
as well have writen the 10 lines or so of C to do the job.
I have been misunderstood. If developers want to write little utilities
for such things, I'm fine with that. It's the
"multi-week developments
they insist on doing themselves because they don't want to learn a tool,
or can't image a tool could be as elegant as what they are cooking up"
solutions that I speak of. If you want to spend a day writing a script
to parse some ROM or clean up a dataset as a one time thing, I'd join
Commercially, there must be trade-offs. I guess everything is ultimately
goverend by money (I wish it wasn't, but that's the way it is), and thus
you have to weigh up the cost of buying the right tool, the cost of
supporting it and the cost of learnign to use it against the cost of
making it from sceatch (and the materials needed to do that if it's a
hardware rather htan software device), the cost of supporting that, and
so on.
you, as I do the same thing (long live AWK, SED, PERL,
SH, etc.). But,
when someone spend weeks re-implementing something I could have
purchased for $1000.00, I'm not as happy. If the support is horrid, I
say find an open source tool that performs the function and learn *THAT*
code.
I totally agree with you.
Of course things are different when we're talking about a hobby (and to
be honset, for most people on this list, classic computers are a
hobby). You do things them because you enjoy them, not because it makes
financial sense. It doesn't amke financial sense to spend several months
writing the repair manual and then restoring a desktop calcaultor when
you canbuy a much more powerful pocket calculator for less than the
repair parts for the old machine cost. But none-the-less I did just that
a couple of years ago, and I enjoyed every minute of it. It's a hobby, so
why not :-)
Similarly, if somebody wants to write an OS for the PDP11 as a hobby
(given there are already quite a few OSes for that machine, at least one
of which would probably be suitable), then I see no reason why they
shouldn't.
You may think I'm misguided, but I can definitely provide information to
No, I don't, after you clarified your position.
-tony