My classiccmp non-retirement :-)

Al> I've been ranting for a while now that people are saving the Al> iron, but not the software that ran on it. It's surprising how Al> little is even left from late 60's IBM 360s (incl the systems Al> themselves), which was the most popular large computing system, Al> and how MUCH has been saved from DEC (thanks to the efforts of Al> collectors and CHM). Perhaps because DEC computers were fun and 360s were not? Al> I'm starting to think that there is going to be a pretty strange Al> view of computer software in the future, since there is so MUCH Al> that was saved from DEC, and almost nothing from Burroughs, Al> UNIVAC, NCR, and Honeywell (the last member of the BUNCH, CDC, Al> seems to have a fair amount saved, though) True. Is there even an emulator for the B-6700 series? Then again, there are even darker spots. Some time ago I went looking for documentation about some Philips computer and found absolutely nothing -- not just for the model I wanted, but nothing for any model at all. About the only thing I could find was a picture of a cover page of some manual (in the Google cache, though the website itself no longer had it). Given that a fair number of CC contributors are European, this is slightly surprising. Not that Philips ever was a particularly impressive computer maker, but they did have some interesting machines. The EL-X8 is historically very significant indeed (for reasons of software, not hardware). And there were some other interesting machines; I remember a minicomputer with 24-bit words and French opcode mnemonics. paul