17 Jul
2005
17 Jul
'05
7:03 p.m.
Neither do I Tony. It's not an investment, my
retirement fund or
anything else but a hobby. I collect what I do because I like unique
hardware or operating systems and I like to figure out what makes them
Exactly. I want to understand how these amchines work at as low a level
as possible. For me, the interesting machines have CPUs built from TTL
and small PROMs/PALs, even bit-slice chips (AMD29xx, etc) are getting too
complicated :-). I'll battle through the schematics and microcode (even
produce said schematics if need be) until I understand what is going on.
Maybe I'm one of the few people who can tell you what ever last gate in a
PERQ 2 or an HP9810 is for. Which IMHO is a pity. I wish more people
could appreciate the beauty in these machines.
tick. There is a thrill in owning a system that used
to cost megabucks
but I managed to get for a few dollars.
THat doesn't bother me at all, except that the interesting machines
tended to be the expensive ones, and that I can't afford more than a few
dollars (or pounds) now...
-tony