I agree with this one! There's no need for a "starter-outer" regardless of his/her current station in life to go after an Imsai or (much worse) an ALTAIR, when those machines weren't that well designed and weren't that well supported. If one wants to start out with an S-100, he should get hold of a widely used, common and therefore likely to be inexpensive, mainframe, or at least backplane, then do the same for known-to-be-compatible memory, CPU, and controller cards, a power supply, and a terminal or PC with a working terminal program and a couple of 8" floppy disk drives. Unfortunately, the presence of the PC with its virtually plug-and-play (chuckle) readily available boards and the MAC with it's even less difficult to set up peripherals, have led the world to believe that devices should just naturally play together. Anyone who's worked with DEC equipment knows that isn't true. Once upon a time, I worked for a DEC-addicted client whose system required redundant PDP11-44's. The DEC folks would deliver the hardware on one day, set up the first rack the second day, get the basic hardware to run on the third, and then one or two days at a time, get the rest to work together. Then there was the second rack . . . Now, even though the two machines had been specifically ordered to be "identical in every way" at a considerable premium, it was not unusual for the DEC folks to have to swap each rack in its entirety several times before they actually had two from which you could extract a board and exchange it with the corresponding board in the other and not have both machines fall apart. Usually, while this was happening, the other 30 or so of us were in day-for-day schedule slip. On the S-100 bus, there were lots of board which worked just fine together. Unfortunately, there were others which did not. The earlier the vintage, the less likely that they'd be particularly interoperable with other manufacturers' equipment. This applied as much to backplanes and serial port boards as to CPU's, memory and FDC's. If a beginner has a few fairly widely used boards, it's likely he can get some help from the guys on this list or from the fellows in the CP/M newsgroup. If he has an Altair, that number is greatly reduced. Nonetheless, if a fellow has an Altair, that's normally the one he wants to get running, irrespective of the associated problems. Suggestions abound, of course, but solid help from experienced users is scarce because there weren't many. What I want to know is why a beginner would want to run old hardware if he doesn't know anything about hardware in general and the general class of hardware with which he's dealing in particular. I can understand it if he used the stuff when he was a pup, or if his father had one. What I read here, however, is mostly stuff from people who have gotten a few pieces of gear for next to no money and expect that since they've got the "big" bits they won't need to spend much more. Unfortunately, that's seldom the case. I read lots of prose from people who've got lots of pieces of lots of systems but haven't a clue what, exactly, is necessary in order to make any of the stuff "do something." Why do you suppose this is? Dick -----Original Message----- From: William Donzelli <aw288(a)osfn.org> To: Discussion re-collecting of classic computers <classiccmp(a)u.washington.edu> Date: Thursday, July 01, 1999 6:37 PM Subject: Re: State of the Hobby