Hardware Hobbyists vs. Emulator Jockeys

In article <4A387019.40706 at jbrain.com>, Jim Brain <brain at jbrain.com> writes: I think its great if you can do it by a means that doesn't violate the historical integrity of the equipment. For instance, at PDPPlanet, they've created efficient switching power supplies for some of their older machines that shipped with linear power supplies. The new power supplies attach by the same connectors and cabling as the vintage supplies and the vintage supplies were kept so that the machine could be restored to historical condition if desired. With the new power supplies, the machine can be made available for public use at a reasonable cost. I particularly like the idea of extending behavior of existing machines by using their existing circuit connectors (busses, plugs, sockets, etc.), even if they were not originally intended to be expanded from those connections. The Tektronix 4010 has an internal bus into which low density SSI cards are inserted to implement the terminal logic and I/O. This was originally intended as a way to provide custom interfaces to the terminal if RS-232 or 20mA current loop was insufficient. I want to hook up a mini ITX motherboard up to that bus and see how many dynamic vectors I can get going on the thing :-). That capacity is mostly limited by the transmission rate supported by the interface card currently. By talking directly to the bus, you should be able to do much more interesting things with it. The canonical example seems to be emulating storage interfaces to provide storage that is larger, more reliable, has no moving parts and is more power efficient. I'd love to run my PDP-11/03 more often, but I am afraid every time I spin up the ancient RL01 drives on it. -- "The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" -- DirectX 9 draft available for download <http://www.xmission.com/~legalize/book/download/index.html> Legalize Adulthood! <http://blogs.xmission.com/legalize/>