Feelings about vintage systems

I suspect there's correlation, but I also suspect that the causality behind it is not as implied by that phrasing. Rather, it seems to me that the machines that one is attached to will be the ones that one gets to know at all available levels. For example, I know more than I really want to about the 8080 at the assembly/machine level - there was a time when I could read 8080 code in hex, without needing to explicitly disassemble it. But I don't feel nostalgic for the 8080, nor any of the machines I've used that were built around it. But the VAX, on the other hand, I am quite fond of, and I know it at pretty much all available levels in every incarnation I've run into. (I went through my larval stage under VMS, and when a friend recently gave me some VAX kit that had VMS on it, I found I remembered more VMS after some twenty years of not touching it than he, who had worked with it within the last few years, did.) I'm not sure the indifference you (and I) see is actually present. I suspect that what's going on there is that there are about as many people really interested in computers and computing as before, but these days it's harder for them to see one another because they're drowned out by the hordes of "computer people" who are just in it to get a decent-paying job and couldn't really care less about the stuff for its own sake. /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents.montreal.qc.ca / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B