14 Jun
2005
14 Jun
'05
4:54 p.m.
Do you depend upon modern computers, or are you a creative spirit who
can push the limits of your old hardware in order to fulfill your
everyday needs? The Retrochallenge is where you find out.
What are these challenges? If you enjoy creating original artwork,
music, or programs on your legacy computer, then the creative
challenges are for you. The second challenge is simply using a
qualifying computer through the month of July, in a competition to see
can survive a month without the latest in gadgetry. The third
challenges judges how well you could communicate with the outside
world on a retrocomputer.
I don't have what you'd class as a moden computer -- I do all my work on
classics. OK, I do sometimes use a more modern machine owned by somebody
else (e.g. in an internet cafe), but I can certainly manage without them
(I could not manage without the clasiscs, though).
Your list of processors bothers me. The 486 and 68040 are certainly not
ancient in my book. They're far too modern to be interesting. But you've
missed of plenty of older processors :
6800/6802/6803/6809
Z8
Z80/64180
8008/8080/8085
650x (not just the 6502, there were other varients...)
SC/MP
6120 (PDP8 on a chip)
DEC's LSI11/T11/F11/J11
MicroVAX
32016
Trasnputer
HP's NUT, Saturn, Capricorn, etc
And I don't believe a processor has to be a single chip. What about the
boards of TTL, PALs, Bit-slice, etc as in
PDP8/e
PDP11 (older Unibus machines)
VAX11/7xx
Philps P800 series (which covers TTL implementations, Philips' own custom
bit-slice chip calles SPALU, a single chip version, a version using
AMD2900 bit-slice, etc)
3 Rivers PERQ
HP98x0
Or discrete transistors :
PDP8
HP9100
Those lists are by no means complete....
-tony