20 Jun
2004
20 Jun
'04
1:14 p.m.
On Tue, 15 Jun 2004 20:43:30 -0700 (PDT)
Vintage Computer Festival <vcf(a)siconic.com> wrote:
On Tue, 15 Jun 2004, Zane H. Healy wrote:
Maybe the list simply needs to take a firm non-Windows stance, or
else specifically OK non-Windows HW that would otherwise be blocked
by the 10 year (or whatever it might get expanded to) rule.
I for one don't care to see any posts about Windows, but wouldn't
object to posts about say the Amiga OS 4.0 beta or an SGI Tezro.
I think that's a bit absolute. In 6 years, when Windows 3.0 will be
20 years old, if someone wishes to set up a Windows 3.0 box for a
historical exhibit, it should be perfectly acceptable to discuss that
here.
That, and there are perfectly acceptable and technically interesting
reasons to discuss some obscure variants and machines that run Windows
3.
Example: I have one of the original HP Omibook 300 machines. It was
made by HP's Corvalis Division, the same group that made the classic HP
Calculators. It has the same design heritage and quality as other
Corvalis projects (it's significantly different that the crap HP later
sold with the 'Omnibook' brandname). It's a 386sx machine with only 2
MB of memory, 4 PCMCIA slots and it runs Windows 3.1, Word 5 and Excel 4
out of ROM memory. In fact, Windows 3.1 and the Office components are
directly embedded in a PCMCIA ROM card that plugs in as one of the
Drives. The 'run directly out of ROM' design of the Omnibook 300 was a
radical and expensive project at HP Corvalis, and while it's a dead-end
architecture it's a really, really cool piece of work. The
'applications' and Windows itself run right out of ROM, not being loaded
into RAM to run- something nobody tried before and nobody has ever tried
since. So the machine can load up pretty hefty Excel spreadsheets and
Word without impacting the tiny 2MB memory built into the machine.
It's interesting enough that the Omnibook 300 is a unique machine, and
technically significant. And it's a natural addition, along with the
HP95lx and HP100 palmtop machines, to anybody collecting HP calculators.
(It's also a cool machine because it runs on four ordinary AA batteries
for practically forever.)
I have PCs running windows because I must, but I
don't need the
latest and greatest Microsoft offering, I am running Windows
NT4.0 with Office 95 (which btw will soon be covered by the 10
year boundary :-).
I expect the 10 year boundary for the list may be revised soon ;) (I told you exceptions will apply ;')
Yep. It's an on-topic machine, by the ten-year rule.