21 Nov
2018
21 Nov
'18
2:22 a.m.
On Wed, 21 Nov 2018 at 02:57, Michael Brutman via cctalk
<cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
Emulators do great things, but they can't replace the visceral
experience of touching real old working hardware. Take the example
the sound of a modem making a 1200 bps connection, or the grinding
noise of a floppy drive zero-track seeking at bootup. Or how
inconvenient it is to shuffle floppy disks around. Or the slightly
out of focus look of a CRT monitor. (If you focused one area, you put
another area out of focus ...)
I agree... but with an exception that came as a slight surprise to me
when I first encountered it.
I learned VMS and Fortran on a VAX 11-780 cluster in the mid-1980s. I
used the computers daily for 3 years, but I never once saw them. They
were hidden away in a back room, tended, I used to imagine, by
operators in white lab coats, probably with very neat hair and heavy
black-rimmed spectacles.
So the first time that I used an emulated VAX over a serial line from
a real DEC terminal, I was struck by how the experience was 100%
faithful to the original.
P.S. Please bottom-post, will you?
--
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