23 Apr
2009
23 Apr
'09
7:50 p.m.
On Thu, Apr 23, 2009 at 4:12 PM, Al Kossow <aek at bitsavers.org> wrote:
Eric J Korpela wrote:
That is true. But it's also part of the challenge. The even harder
part is to get someone to pay you to reverse engineer an obsolete
computer. Not many of us can afford to do it for fun. Although we
will try.
A transistor is a
device that you buy because you can't make one yourself without
spending way too much money. A video card is essentially the same
thing. You can make one yourself. Some day we will be forced to in
order to keep our machines running. The main difference is that the
theory of operation of a transistor can be expressed in a 1 page
document. The theory of operation of a video card is a small book
that requires references to other books.
The fundamental problem is since the mid 80's you have rarely been able
to buy complete information to duplicate (or in some cases even program)
the hardware you are buying. On the other hand, now that people have a handful of
common platforms, much
more
sophisticated software is being written.
Commodity hardware comes with advantages and drawbacks. One advantage
is that it will be a long time before the last ISA graphics card bites
the dust.