24 Jul
1998
24 Jul
'98
11:01 a.m.
Of course, this is a bit of a problem for people like me, who are too
young for an IMSAI, never mind a PDP8
only
I've used - and repaired - a lot of embedded
control systems using
machines like the PDP11, PDP8, Data General Nova, etc. These machines
work as well today as they did 25 years ago when they were made, they
still do the same job running the same software. There is simply no
reason to replace a reliable, documented solution with a modern
undocumented one.
It's not quite the same. All PC components are third-party and thus
there is no guarantee it will work quite right. Are the
well-documented IBM PC, XT, and AT machines better in this sense?
Since you have the manuals, you could probably build your own MDA
card!
Contrast that to the modern PC. If it fails, you swap
boards until it
works again, never really knowing that you've found the fault. And you
don't know that the new video card (say) won't behave slightly
differently to the old one. Seen it happen far to often to want to
depend
on such a machine.
Problem is, I'm an electronic engineer. So I tend
to use computers -
including old ones - to help with that work. And I'm not afraid of
taking
a soldering iron to them.
Case in point. 10 minutes ago I needed to examine the contents of a ROM
chip - an obscure old ROM chip - from a word processing system I'm
repairing. I've got a special card in an old IBM XT that'll do that.
Not
hardware hacking per se, though - just a homemade tool
to help with my
work.
> >>I'd like to hear stories about how this technology can be applied
to a
>>job
and does it well. The general slant of the article is to be
>>positive, but if anyone has any good stories about failures which
>>occurred because you can't do EVERYTHING with older technology.
That is _very_ uncommon. A lot of old machines are in embedded control
systems, which have been running the same program since they were made.
They don't stop running it properly just because a new machine has come
on the market...
And anyway, CPU speed is often needed (for mainstream applications) to support the user interface. I personally have
formatted and printed
a
200 page manual using TeX/LaTeX on a 386 PC. A 286
would probably have
done it just as well. TeX may not be user friendly for the new user,
but
it certainly is friendly to the experienced user who
wants a text
formatter that doesn't get in the way.
______________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com
>>
>>mailto:billakent@hotmail.com
-tony