29 Sep
2005
29 Sep
'05
3:42 p.m.
Eh. Dump the 10 year rule and cut off at 1994.
I'm serious. The computer world is not a flat, linear space from
1948 to present. Somewhere after the beginning of the
pc/appliance age, computers are qualitatively different.
The culture and tech is different too. You could more easily lump
the mini and mainframe people together than the mini and pc
people. When the computer-user count became in the millions it's
simply not the same.
At some point post-1990 computers became near-pure commodity. It's
like collecting toasters. There are intersting models, but not in
the way that say 1960s or even 1970s are -- pretty much ANY
computer from the 70s and even 80s is "interesting". Pretty much
anything post-MSDOS is deadly dull -- with exceptions of course.
Consistency is for machinery.
The problem with dumping the 10 year rule, and putting the cut off at
1994 is that you miss out on some really cool, and classic hardware.
Systems that even if they don't meet the 10 year rule fall into the
classic category in my mind would be the BeBox (and BeOS itself), any
SGI IRIX Workstation, any Alpha capable of running VMS, and any
UltraSparc based Sun box. I'd also include any Amiga HW, including
the new Mini-ITX boards, and the MorphOS boxes. I'm also inclined to
include specific pieces of Apple HW, such as the original G4's
running Mac OS 8.6 (yes, they exist) or the original G5 duals.
Zane
--
--
| Zane H. Healy | UNIX Systems Administrator |
| healyzh at aracnet.com (primary) | OpenVMS Enthusiast |
| | Classic Computer Collector |
+----------------------------------+----------------------------+
| Empire of the Petal Throne and Traveller Role Playing, |
| PDP-10 Emulation and Zane's Computer Museum. |
| http://www.aracnet.com/~healyzh/ |