22 Nov
2006
22 Nov
'06
5:50 p.m.
There are probably two schools of thought on this.
The purist collector
would rather have the machine as is, even if non-functional. The
pragmatic collector would want it working. I'm leaning towards the
latter. :-)
I am very much the latter. A computer is not a piece of fine art, and
shouldn't necessarily come under exactly the same conservation rules. A
computer is interesting to me because it computes, and because it's an
interesting electronic circuit. Not because of what it looks like, or
exactly when all the components wrre nade.
[...]
I don't view replacing components with modern
equivalents any worse than
replacing dried up capacitors. We should of course be honest and
Be careful here. If I remlace a dried-up 100uF capacitor with a modern
100uF capacitor, then the electrical circuit is unchanged. The machine
remains as the designer inteneded. But if I replace a lot of logic with
an FPGA, or if I replace a hard drive with CF, or whatever, then the
machine is no longer as the designer designed it. And I would like to
avoid that if possible.
That said, I certainly have no problem with reversable modifications.
Unplugging the cables from a failed hard drive and plugging them into a
PCB containing a CF card + logic is a very sensible thing to do if it
keeps the machine running
-tony