4 Sep
2003
4 Sep
'03
7:14 p.m.
TeoZ wrote:
<snip>
Its not just the hardware, its the software that you run on it thats
classic.
While I have no love for the commodity PC I do love the classic games that
ran on them.
The best selling PC in the world was a C64, it was ground breaking for price
performance, sold in the 8-10,000,000 and isnt rare at all.
A machine without software is just a nice looking door stop. Its a
combination of the machine and the software that makes a classic in my eyes.
Actually, the software ~may~ be classic, but this is not always the case..
In many cases a classic CPU exists and is quite practical to restore and
operate, but the vintage
peripherals like disk drives are no longer practical for normal use.
Most often this is because the
media has a finite life and is no longer made. More commonly someone
finds a CPU but none
of the supporting peripherals come with it.
Rather than use a real classic CPU as a doorstop (real classics are too
large for a task better
left to a commodity product like the C64) you can interface the classic
machine to a PC or other
host system and get software from some of the excellent archives on the
web (like Jeff Moffat's).
After all, many real classics have core memory and simply are not as
disk-dependant as modern
systems.
I agree with the windows support group being a bad idea. A Powermac 8500
isnt a classic machine, but when people start talking about getting their
Videovision Studio with Telecast running and the cool things it can do I get
interested (yes I have a setup). I am also interested in not so common
software (Apple A/UX , Desqview/X on the PC) on common equipment. Where do
you draw the line between "How do I save a file in windows 95" to "I have
a
glitch in my A/D data aquisition card in my Pentium Lab machine"?
Easy!
Both are off-opic IMO.