Feelings about vintage systems

I think for some of us it does, I have "fond spots" for various systems that I spent untold time digging into every details of .... however I think that it may be more because "thats what we do" than a special thing about low- level activity in general. I get frequent emails from people who tell me about how a photo on my site has stirred fond memories of long-gone systems. Most of these are assembly types. I get authors telling me how they wrote their first books on such and such a machine. Others tell me about varous software packages that they liked. Each found the machine unique and interesting for different reasons realting to what they used them for. Computers used to be special - If you didn't have one, you worked to get into a position where you could use one. Off-time at the job site, or gettng to know the lucky SOB across town who has one. Some of us designed and built our own as it was the fastesst way to get "a machine". Each setup was different, different cards, prcoessors, system software - all unique and highly interesting. You would spend days/weeks/months figuring out how "everything worked". There was a certain joy in the creative aspect of doing a lot of it yourself as well. I wrote my own OS's, languages, tools, utilities and lots more - just because I found it fun. Now computers are more common than toasters (really - most of the people I know have more computers than toasters) - did you find your toaster especially interesting in the "old days"? Want a computer? - Just take a stroll down a few city streets on the evening before trash pickup. Unique - Yeah, if you count that fact that system A) has a different video driver and consequently exhibits different apparently unrelated bugs than system B) ... Want to understand everything about it? - good luck just disassembling the BIOS - not to mention the 100megs of "os". Want datasheets on the proprietary chips in the various peripherals - good luck (here's your winblows driver, have a nice day - and don't forget to update it from our web site). Want to write your own code - OK, this huge stack of manuals (excuse me - PDF files) is an approcimation of the API specs for the library that hides the undocumented details of the OS from you, yeah it seems daunting, but just pickup up a "learn to design complex software systems in 21 days" book - feh... computers are no longer interesting - they are overly complicated bug-ridden toasters. (but generally not as useful). Dave -- dave06a (at) Dave Dunfield dunfield (dot) Firmware development services & tools: www.dunfield.com com Collector of vintage computing equipment: http://www.classiccmp.org/dunfield/index.html