On Fri, 28 Jan 2005, Tom Jennings wrote: Tom, we do mean this to be "... and which uses electricity for operation"..... *ducks and runs away* --f

On Fri, 28 Jan 2005, Tom Jennings wrote: In full knowledge that this will only prolong YAIOT10YRD (Yet Another Iteration of the 10 Year Rule Discussion) how about we say the rule is anything 10 years or older, unless it comes from Microsoft, in which case it must be 20 years or older? It already allows DOS, and excludes Windows 3.0 until about 2010, which is about when I may even start feeling nostalgic about it. -- Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org [ Old computing resources for business || Buy/Sell/Trade Vintage Computers ] [ and academia at www.VintageTech.com || at http://marketplace.vintage.org ]

Vintage Computer Festival wrote: Why not just forget the 10 year rule altogether and just address the problem of Microsoft/Mac/Linux modern products. You need two lists soon -- classic computers ( blinking lights) and classic 8 bit cpu's ( ie - cp/M) and modern classic computers ... 386's +. Ben. PS. or just two lists ... stuff with binking lights and junk with out. :) stuff: junk we keep. junk: stuff we toss out.

On Sun, 30 Jan 2005, woodelf wrote: GAK! >>>>>>>>> I did not write the above, Sellam did :-) Communication technology failed us. Well, many old machines, like the 1950's LGP-30, don't have *any* blinking lights. My LGP-21 POWER, STOP, START, I/O pushbuttons. Only three of them light. None blink. It's old. I think 10 yrs is as fine as anything, for now. Personally (my personal preference, not a judgement call) is anything in a beige box is landfill (I make rare exceptions). Hypothetically, in 5, 10, 15 years when the DEC crowd (bulk of the list) has been replaced with Microsoft products, I won't be here. That stuff bores me to tears. I realize others stay up at night fantasizing over it. Each their own perversions. Another alternative to the 10-year rule is something with a specific cutoff date, and an entirely subjective sloppy exceptions list. Personally, I'd be happy with the list utterly excluding Microsoft and Apple products wider than 8 bits (8088 is 16 bits). Or maybe two [four] lists, vintage Dos/Win (actually, that might fly anyways) and the crustier stuff separate. Not very seriously, you could say any computer that consumes < 5 amps at the line cord is excluded, but then there's the LGP-21 again -- 300 watts. Tom Jennings &lt;tomj(a)wps.com&gt;

It was written... ... snip ... There's way too many problems with defining something as classic based on it's age. Some things (songs, cars, etc.) become virtually classic the day they are invented. I would put forth the following dictionary definition of the word: 'Classic: forming a tradition or linked to one, often in opposition to more recent schools or theories'. Since (like it or not), modern operating systems and processors/hardware are "recent schools or theories", they are by definition not classic. The older software and hardware are generally "in opposition to" these more recent schools of thought. There's many examples - one would be how we used to spend hours looking to save an instruction cycle or two bytes of code as contrasted to the "memory and processor cycles are cheap" paradigm that is current thought generally. In addition, the very uniqueness of each of the old machines as opposed to the current "everything is windows-based" and all pretty similar. So there's the distinction of many varied systems, some better in some areas while the rest are innovative or better in the remaining areas. These are in direct opposition to the "sameness" of current platforms. A third example is how many of us at least try to understand the complete system, down to the chips on the board. The recent school of thought is you just have to know how to use word & excel. There's quite a few more examples which I'm sure you all are cognizant of. And because of the fact that we are all here talking about these systems, well, that speaks for the tradition we're linked to. Windows can't be considered "classic" because it IS the recent school of thought/theory. When it hasn't been the prevailing school of thought for a while, AND it is in opposition of the then current school of thought - it may well become classic and perfect for discussing here. This is not likely to happen in our lifetimes. A major strike against that ever happening is that it was (is) SO pervasive so I'm not sure it ever be "classic". But in the final analysis, this argument is one that will be decided by our children & grandchildren, not us. This is exactly why I'm not opposed to DOS being discussed on the list. It comes from the days of the traditions I speak of above, before 90% of the cpu and memory was dedicated to a pretty gui. Regards, Jay West

You wrote... Darn, I thought I was crystal clear :) We don't really decide what becomes classic computing. Society as a whole does. They have already spoken with regards to the machines we typically discuss here, by virtue of them moving to a different (and current) school of thought in those systems. They have yet to speak on various versions of windows because they are still in common use. My own view: (just examples to illustrate the point, not meant to be a definitive list) C64 w/GEOS - definitely on-topic DOS - definitely on-topic DOS with some other early GUI shell that is not the mainstream today - definitely on-topic DOS with Windows on top of it (Win 3.1) - grey area, I suspect not though as it's certainly representitive of the current school of thought Windows - not for a long, long, long, long time. Think decades. I think that by posing the question you do, in the exact way that you did, shows a desire for us to make some kind of determination. That's not our place. We can't decide history in advance of it occuring :) Jay

See previous post, it's covered.

You wrote... Desqview is clearly on-topic, see my previous post :> Because they fit the definition I gave (or more specifically, that the dictionary gave). They are generally considered classic :) True, I have a lot of faith in the self-policing nature of the people here :> And as an alternate datapointOfView, Mr. Erlacher did have some good input at times! I left out in my previous definition of "classic", the second word of the list name - "Computing". So classic cars are not on-topic. Unless you want to discuss interfacing an 11/40 to the engine, or the oddball microprocessor in the car that is no longer in common use ;) Jay West

Computer Collector Newsletter wrote: really? which one? (ok, I'll admit it - I want a yellow '69 Europa. alway have. but I can't imagine it has any computers in it. maybe some webers ;-) -brad

On 31/01/2005, at 7:05 PM, Lawrence Wilkinson wrote: No why did you have to post this :-) I'd just decided to buy a new Golf Turbo Diesel and now you tell me if I spend about $60K more I can get a car that runs Forth..... OK, to add a little bit of CC to this. ISTR that Forth was originally developed on PDP-11s but what other classic hardware of the era was it used? Which of these will fit inside the Golf :-) Huw Davies | e-mail: Huw.Davies(a)kerberos.davies.net.au Melbourne | "If soccer was meant to be played in the Australia | air, the sky would be painted green"

On Mon, 2005-01-31 at 12:19, Huw Davies wrote: I suppose it's just as well I never mentioned that the McLaren F1 road car runs the same system :-) In fact the Elise /can/ be used as a general-purpose Forth system, as the debug port (suitably encrypted) is just a Forth command-line - it has the standard vocabulary and a bit of free memory to do your own stuff. I can't remember how the debug port works, so don't bother asking! -- Lawrence Wilkinson lawrence(a)ljw.me.uk Ph +44(0)1869-811059 http://www.ljw.me.uk -- Lawrence Wilkinson lawrence(a)ljw.me.uk Ph +44(0)1869-811059 http://www.ljw.me.uk

Isn't it quicker to list the classic computers that don't run Forth? Heck, there's even a Forth ROM for the HP71 and a Forth tape for the HP75... -tony

The one I want is the Elise, but I can't afford that, so I'm sticking with the Miata (it holds very little, why else do you think I collect PDAs/handhelds?)... anyway I've got a GPS antenna hooked up to my PocketPC.. so you could say my car is Windows powered... man that is a scary concept. (We all know the story of how Bill Gates supposedly said the auto industry should be more like the computer industry, in terms of much lower costs and stuff; and how some car exec replied with something like "yes but the cars would crash twice a day and ask 'are you sure' before the airbag goes off...) --- Lawrence Wilkinson &lt;ljw-cctech(a)ljw.me.uk&gt; wrote: ===== Tell your friends about the Computer Collector Newsletter! -- It's free and we'll never send spam or share your email address -- Publishing every Monday(-ish), ask about writing for us -- Mainframes to videogames, hardware and software, we cover it all -- W: http://news.computercollector.com E: news(a)computercollector.com -- 665 readers and counting!

Should it ever come to that -- that is that I can't get the parts to _repair_ the hard drives (note : I would certainly consider making a 'clean box' to work on the inside of the HDA if necessary), then I would grab the soldering iron, raid the junk box, and design an interface to a more modern storage device. Heck, I've seen flash memory cards with more storage than the hard drives in most of my machines.... It depends on what you want to do, I guess. I have no interest -- at all -- in digital audio or video processing. I will only _consider_ buying a digital camera when the results available are better than those from my currnet film-based cameras (which, considering I have a number of large-format sheet film cameras, won't be for some time!). For the applications I use a computer for (text processing, programming, supporting my classics by doing automatic testing, EPROM dumping, assembling/disassembly binary programs, etc) a classic computer does all I need! -tony

Please don't take this as a flame, but I am always suprised by the people who run classic computers (as opposed to running emulators) and who don't want to get into the hardware. To me [1] that's one of the reasons for running an old machine. [1] And to a university computer society that I was a member of, which had a 'Hardware and Old Systems SIG' Finding good spare parts gets significantly easier as the parts get smaller :-). Finding a complete board may well be next to impossibe, finding a TTL chip is relatively easy. Even if it's a custom chip that's failed, you might well be able to find a defective board with that chip still good on it. That's how my HP45 came into being, a friend gave me the contents of his junk box, including 2 dead HP45 logic boards, several dead and part-raided keyboard PCBs, etc. There were enough displays to completely populate a keyboard PCB (even if one of them has smaller digits than the other 2), of the logic boards, one had a dead A&R chip, the other had a dead C&T. I now have a pieced-together, working, 45. The other thing is that even if you can't do the design, you may be able to copy xomebody else's (And you can be assured that anything I do related to classic computers will be shared). [Cue for the well-known story about the mathematician Littleword 'How ever little French I know, I am capable of copying a French sentence'] -tony

Zane, I fit into the software weenie category too. Back in the late 1970s I practically lived on the PDP-11/40, but the computer was behind a locked door. I did all my stuff sitting in another room on a VT50 DecScope. I know enough about the hardware to configure a board and install it, and hook up and test terminals, drives, and other devices, but as of yet I have not taken the time to figure out how to trace circuits and debug hardware problems with individual circuitboards. I try to keep enough spare boards, drives, power supplies, etc., so that I can replace the whole board if something goes wrong. My pleasure is seeing the old blinkenlights machines running the old operating systems and programs on the old platforms. Ashley

That is the main reason that I collect minicomputers, PERQs, etc. I can get amongst the CPU electornics, I can look at the outputs of the ALU on a logic analyser, I can watch microinstructions doing their thing. You can't do that on a micro :-) And FWIW, I am still learning, and probably will carry on doing that for a very long time. -tony

Jerome Fine replies: As many of you know, I am purely an RT-11 (operating system) addict. While I am able to wire wrap a DLV11-J board and plug it into the Qbus backplane, that is about my hardware limit. I doubt that I could successfully solder anything at this point and I do not wish to spend the time that it would take to acquire even 10% of what Tony has forgotten. Don't be so sure. I know of one bug in RT-11 which has been there for over 30 years. Because it fails on a random basis, and even then VERY rarely, the specific nature of the bug does not seem to have been detected, as far as I know, by anyone else. I have a fix which hobby users will have available as soon as the documentation is finished. Don't assume that even very widely used old software that seems to be working correctly has no bugs. Sincerely yours, Jerome Fine -- If you attempted to send a reply and the original e-mail address has been discontinued due a high volume of junk e-mail, then the semi-permanent e-mail address can be obtained by replacing the four characters preceding the 'at' with the four digits of the current year.

Jerome Fine replies: The problem with design bugs is that they can sometimes exist in both hardware and software (usually complex) for decades before the bug is identified. In the case of the software bug that I see in RT-11, it was found by inspecting the code, NOT by the bug causing a failure. PLUS, the difficulty with marginal timing problems is that they occur so infrequently AND they are almost impossible to duplicate. BOTH hardware and software, as far as I understand - although you would have the knowledge about being able to duplicate a marginal timing problem in hardware. BUT, when there is a marginal timing problem in software, that is often described as a race condition. The code was written (almost always NOT intentional due to a lack of understanding that the race condition exists - which is why it really is a bug in the first place) with the assumption that between instruction (a) and (b) - usually with relatively few instructions in-between - no other code would ever execute that relies upon using the results of the instructions at both (a) and (b) being executed at exactly the same time. The software solution is to reduce the number of instructions between (a) and (b) as much as possible (often having no instructions in-between) and then locking out interrupts before (a) and unlocking after (b) thereby ensuring that no other code which assumes that (a) and (b) were executed at the same time can be executed in-between (a) and (b). Perhaps you could define how hardware handles a timing problem. It would be interesting to hardware fellows like yourself, just as my description of the software timing problem would interest software fellows like myself (maybe). Sincerely yours, Jerome Fine -- If you attempted to send a reply and the original e-mail address has been discontinued due a high volume of junk e-mail, then the semi-permanent e-mail address can be obtained by replacing the four characters preceding the 'at' with the four digits of the current year.

I try to have a reason for everything I do. I am not arogant enough to claim I am always right, of course :-) FRor example, I try not to be a linux bigot. Yes, I run linux, and yes I like it. For _what I do_ I think it's the best choice. That doesn't mean it's the best choice for everyone, and I am quite prepared to accept that other OSes, yes even including those from M$, are better choices for some people. I do however know that Windows would not be the right choice _for me_. I am the sort of person who will almost never trade quality for ease-of-use :-) I am prepared to put in the time and effort to get things right. Again, I can see the uses of digital cameras for some applications. An obvious example is press work. The ability to transfer pictures across the worlds seconds after they are taken is obviously a good thing there. But I don't need to do that. I prefer the much-superior quality that I get from a good film camera. Incidnetally, the cost for me to get a reasonable digital SLR + lens (because none of my existing lenses would fit) + PC + colour printer would significantly exceed what I paid for a good second-hand large-format (5"*4") sheet film camera + lens + new bellows + a good enlarger with colour head + all the other darkroom bits... In fact the amount of money saved will buy a lot of film and paper... It's also worth remembering that quality can be easily removed, it can never be added. If, for some reason, I want one of my photographs in digital form, then the negative or print can be scanned (OK, I don;t have a scanner, but I can find somebody who does). And I still have the original film. If I'd taken the picture with a digital camera, no way could I have got the informatiom that was lost due to the lack of resolution of said camera. Can you not couple 2 diginal cameras together with the lenses a suitable distance apart. Or use one of the prism assemblies that fit on the front of the lens and fiddle the resulting image file? I estimate that a good 35mm camera + film is the equivalent of at least 20 megapixels.... Of course the pixel count is not the whole story. As the number of pixels increases, the size of each photoreceptor site on the CCD (or whatever sensor is used) goes down. So the amount of chrage produced per site goes down too. You get more noise. Cameras with a large quoted number of pixels tend to do poorly in low light conditions (and aren't brilliant in daylight!). Film, in a sense, has the same problem, in that faster (more sensitive) films have a larger grain size. But at least with film I can pick the right one for the job. I can decide I need 800 ASA film because I am taking pictures inside a building and can't use flash. Or I can pick Kodachrome 64 because I am taking static subjects on my workbench and it doesn't matter if I have 10 second exposures. Oh well, this off-topic bit has gone on long enough ;-) Incidentally, I am not 'against' digital cameras in the sense that I don't allow them to be used near me, of course. If I take some of my toys, say, to an HPCC meeting, then members are welcome to photograph them, and they can use film, digital, video tape, whatever. The only thing I object to is flashpowder (the magnesium oxide smoke doesn't do my machines any good at all!). Electronic flash or flashbulbs are fine... Hmm... All that I've 'publisehd', including my Ph.D. thesis and the HP48 I2C interfacve manual were produced on classic hardware. OK, in the former case the diagrams came from a CAD system on a mac, saved as postscript files and transfered across to this linux box. In the latter case, the diagrams were produced on a PC/XT machine with a CGA display, saved as HPGL files, then transfered to the linx box. There I used hp2xx(1) to turn them into epc files All the text, of course, was formatted with TeX / LaTeX which will run on classic computers. The dvips printer driver will quite hapilly pull in eps files and get them in the right places.... I find the separate editing/formating stages to be much easier to handle than a more normal word processor/DTP program. -tony