16 Nov
2006
16 Nov
'06
8:11 a.m.
On 16 Nov 2006 at 9:31, Sridhar Ayengar wrote:
More than money, for my collection, I had to sacrifice
most of the space
in my house. Many people would think I'm crazy for collecting machines
that take up hundreds of square feet each, but for me the motivation is
to play with the machines I lusted after an *account* on.
Then, it must be like chocolate. Work for Hershey's for a few years
on the line and you probably don't have much of a taste left.
Being in a manufacturer's special systems group, I got all of the
hands-on time that I could possibly want (mostly in the hours between
11PM and 7AM) on big iron. Ever use a Cyber 74 cluster as a
keypunch? Played baseball and other games for hours on the
operator's console on an otherwise idle machine. When I moved into
microporocessors, the same was true, only the hours were better and I
could take a system home with me.
While there were some clever hardware implementations and interesting
programming, I've never developed a desire to even run an emulator
for one of these old systems. Even in the microprocessors I've
accumulated, it's mostly "power them up and see if they'll boot" and
then put them away again or get rid of them. A modern PC can do so
much more and more quickly.
Cheers,
Chuck