On 11 Nov 2007 at 17:03, Tim Shoppa wrote:
And I'm also interested in peripheral systems...
but not so much for
the intracicies of the hardware (although I do find that interesting).
Media is my interest. I can emulate pretty much any of the old
systems, but what's on the media is irreplaceable. How many times
does an old computer pop up with nothing to run on it.
By extension, I'm interested in old word processing systems,
laboratory equipment, process control gear as well as CNC the same
reason--to get at the information that makes 'em tick.
Since most of my work is at a very low level, primitive operating
systems such as MS-DOS and CP/M are part of my interest.
There's nothing wrong with DEC equipment. I was in charge of an VAX
11/750 running some flavor of BSD for a few years during the 80's.
The guy who sold us the system swore that it would support bisync
(HASP) over a leased 9600 bps line--and we purchased the system based
on that. That was a lesson. We never could get the VAX to to do the
job, so we hooked up a 5150 with an add-on hard disk expansion
cabinet (must have been 1983-84) and ran a bisync package on that and
moved the data to and from the VAX via an RS232 serial hookup.
My experience with DEC was not entirely pleasurable and the people
who were doing the third-party support work for BSD were clueless.
Cheers,
Chuck