10 Year Rule

I think that's completely unworkable. In the next room I have a machine. It has a GUI, a mouse, bitmapped display, networking, and so on. Sounds like something close to the modern mainstram, yes? Well, I think it's a classic computer by any reasonable standard. Or do people object to PERQs now ;-). Most modern computers have winchester hard disks. Does that mean that discussions of the SA4000 series are now off-topic? Most machines discusser here (and most machines that I own [1]) have a von Neuman architecture. So do most modern machines. Does that make almost all of what we talk about off-topic? [1] The main exceptions being calculators like my trusty HP41, which have separate program and data storage spaces, with separate connections back to the CPU. You can argue that's not a computer if you like, but a machine with alphanumeric I/O, a disk drive, RS232 port, HPIB port, that is user-progammable, and which I've been known to program in machine code [2] sure sounds like a computer to me. And yes, it's way over 10 years old. [2] Because of the separate program and data areas (user language programs count as data, to be interpreted by the machine code progam in ROM), doing this is a pain. You need a special RAM box, normally called an MLDL (machine language development lab) which appears as ROM to the HP41's processor, but which can be loaded as data RAM. -tony