Hardware vs Simh

Of course thee is. There's also more to running a classic computr than jsut the CPU. You should run demountable hard drivesd and learn how to replace heads and realign them (I've done it, and enjoyed it). You should run ASR33 terminals and know how to striap and rebuild one. And so on. But I would also argue that nobody (or at least very few people) wil leb equally interested in hardware and software. If you are a hardware person, you will want to ru nthe real hardawre, you will want to laod the alignment pack and connect the 'scope to the read preamplifer. You will want to have a logic analyser conencted ot the CPU microcode address bus and wacch how it executes machine instructions. Conversely, you might be more interested in understnadin the OS, or writing programs for it, or sorting out the remaining bugs, or improvinge the OSes, or. And in that case, evn though it goes totally agaisnt what _I_ like doing, I see no reason not to use a simulator. Ulimately this is a hobby (at least for most of us). IMHO, the 2 main requirements of a hobby are that you enjoy it and that it doesn't have an adverse affect on otehrs not conencted with hobby. And thus IMHO, it is a personal choice which aspects of 'classic computing' you want to enjoy. There is no 'rgith and wrong' All others can do is explain what they do, and why. -tony