--- Bruce Ray <bkr(a)WildHareComputers.com> wrote: photo Nice shots. I recognize a bunch of them, but I've never _seen_ a pedestal-mounted PDP-8/i (I've had a rack mounted one since high-school). Has anyone here ever seen that -8/i variant? It looks right off the set of Space: 1999. -ethan __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get email at your own domain with Yahoo! Mail. http://personal.mail.yahoo.com/

Last night, I attended the 175th monthly meeting of the Amiga Users of Calgary. That didn't seem like much until I did the math; that's 14.5 years

of meetings (!), and probably more given that for the past few years they've taken two of the summer months off. It got me wondering which users group holds the record for longest continuous operation, where members actually attend meetings at a regular interval. I know that the Toronto PET Users Group, which is still active, has been running since 1978. Interestingly, their Website (http://www.icomm.ca/tpug/) says they're the _second_ oldest Commodore club. I thought this might make a fun thread. So who's older? Are there any older clubs still active? And isn't it sad that Wintel computers are so generic and boring that people don't form user's groups anymore?

Mark Gregory skrev: S.U.G.A. has been active since 1986 and is now Sweden's oldest Amiga user group (before AUGS folded, one was never certain), and we're still having meetings every week.

The Boston Computer Society might have held the title, had they not folded a few years ago.

The ACGNJ was founded in March of 1975, and continues to host a dozen different SIG meetings per month at the Scotch Plains (NJ) Rescue Squad. http://www.acgnj.org These are the folks who brought us the SIG/M and PC-BLUE collections and the Trenton Computer Festival (even though it's no longer in Trenton :) http://www.tcf-nj.org/

This brings to mind the fact that (at least the first of) the Amiga patents should be expiring within the next two or three years. This should mean something to Amiga hobbyists, shouldn't it? I've seen people implementing 6502 cores in FPGAs these days. Surely the Amiga custom chips would be good candidates for similar treatment when Gateway no longer has the right to sue somebody to make them quit. (Gateway still owns the patents even though they no longer own the Amiga trademark. What they plan to do with them in the next couple years -- aside from keeping others from making good use of them -- is beyond me.)

Copyright doesn't preclude other designs which perform equivalent tasks. A reverse engineered version of a custom chip is perfectly legal under copyright law despite recent attempts by congress to make it illegal.

"Eric J. Korpela" wrote:

> > > This brings to mind the fact that (at least the first of) the > > > Amiga patents should be expiring within the next two or three years. > > > This should mean something to Amiga hobbyists, shouldn't it? I've > > > seen people implementing 6502 cores in FPGAs these days. Surely the > > > Amiga custom chips would be good candidates for similar treatment when > > > Gateway no longer has the right to sue somebody to make them quit. > > > (Gateway still owns the patents even though they no longer own the > > > Amiga trademark. What they plan to do with them in the next couple > > > years -- aside from keeping others from making good use of them -- is > > > beyond me.) > > > > Aren't the designs, which are what really matter here, still copyrighted? > > Copyright doesn't preclude other designs which perform equivalent tasks. > A reverse engineered version of a custom chip is perfectly legal under > copyright law despite recent attempts by congress to make it illegal. > > Under patent law it would not be, if the chip is similar enough to fall > under the specifics of the patent (as would surely be the case in this > instance.)

That's my understanding as well. There are (or at least have been) at least two Amiga clone motherboards developed in the post-Commodore era, but I believe that those use the same custom chips that the actual Amiga hardware used. As the supply of those chips necessarily dwindles, it would seem that people could replicate their functionality in high density programmable logic (FPGAs and whatnot) in order to make compatible designs, but for the patents. Actually, I seem to remember hearing that some of the Amiga patents were software patents -- can anybody confirm that?

I have never seen an actual 8/I or Nova pedestal system in person and do

know anybody who has managed to collect one. Are they even functional? A figment only of marketing?