At 04:28 PM 3/6/2005, Scott Stevens wrote: That's right, tools are on-topic if they're being used to repair old computers, unless the tools run Windows. :-) - John

On Sun, 2005-03-06 at 20:06 -0500, Ethan Dicks wrote: To me that implies that the company behind such beasts have no clue what they're doing, given that alternatives exist that are far more robust and don't have licensing requirements that push the cost up. Presumably such machines boot from hard disk too? (I've never seen any flavour of Windows boot from ROM). Although maybe there are other reasons to have a hard disk in there anyway (logging etc.) but personally I'd rather have a network connection on the back of the device and do any such logging on a commodity PC server elsewhere. Maybe it's one of those things that'll sort itself out; more robust and cheaper products will doubtless emerge that *don't* use Windows. I can't forsee any selling point that makes Windows sound better than any alternative. (Mind you, I'd say the same for things like set-top boxes, music devices, hard-disk video recorders etc. and lots of those seem to suffer cheers J.

On Sun, 2005-03-06 at 17:28 -0500, Scott Stevens wrote: I believe this to be the first and last time in my life that I have ever seen a topic START off-topic and drift ON-TOPIC! I... I... don't know what to say! I'm scared. -- Tore S Bekkedal <toresbe at ifi.uio.no>

On Sun, 06 Mar 2005 23:50:03 +0000 Gordon JC Pearce <gordon at gjcp.net> wrote: Okay. I will offer the following for $5, to the first five interested people, to get this project rolling: 1. Two 6100 processor chips 2. A CDROM with the 61xx family datasheets, and the manuals, tech data, etc. of the Intercept, and Intercept, Jr. (the Junior is a system that used the 6100 chip) 3. A single 2Kx8 SRAM chip. I'm limiting this to the first five people (which is negotiable if more people than that are really interested) who want to be involved building a real 'blinking lights/switches' 6100-based PDP-8 computer project, because I don't want this to turn into a 'collectable silicon chip to sit in the anti-static mat forever' giveaway. I've sold a few of these 6100 chips for much higher prices than this to chip collectors not interested in a 'project' like this, that's not what this offer is intended as. I do probably have some of the other parts and misc. to kick off this project. The 6100 has been termed 'one of the easiest processors ever to experiment with' because it has some of the most liberal clocking requirements of any microprocessor, ever. It's all Static CMOS, so you can clock it with a pushbutton at one-cycle-per-second if you like. Please reply in this thread, and contact me in email for private info (mailing address, etc.) so there's a 'visibly public' presence for a project like this. I have access to some decent always-on web space (at freeshell.org) so project details and a web page can be put up as things develop. -Scott