Semi-OT: IDE & SATA to USB "dongles"

On 5/31/2006 at 1:00 PM Liam Proven wrote: I suspect that part of what's going on here is the personal association with an old piece of hardware and wanting to keep the memory of the experience alive. (If that makes any sense). My father once wanted to acquire an old receiver because he remembered tinkering with A and B batteries, variocouiplers, book variable capacitors and other bits of early electronics when he was young. He eventually found an old Atwater-Kent, but soon tired of it when he realized that what wasn't there was the old radio programming. Old receivers can make interesting decorations, but modern gear does the job better and cheaper. I still have a couple of old systems that I was part of the development effort on back in the 1970's. They work, but, after all, they're pretty limited in capability and I've tried to give them away. I'll probably hang onto them for a couple of more years and then, if there are no takers, break them down and recycle their parts. After all, what's the difference between machines that run CP/M 2.2? (These run a proprietary operationg system, but compared to NetBSD, it's painfully primitive). Besides, I have an emulator that seamlessly integrates most of the useful CP/M programs into Windows 2000, if I have such a need. While I have some pleasant memories of the experiences, I have no desire to revisit the days of big mainframes. Compared to today's hardware, they were big, slow, noisy and terribly unreliable. While I think that it's worthwhile keeping samples of the old stuff around for museums as well as preserving the ephemera and media content for historical purposes, keeping old hardware alive for personal collections has a purpose that eludes my understanding. I have a small collection of old musical instruments, but one can still play a 100 year old cornet or tuba and it compares favorably with items of modern manufacture. Cheers, Chuck