On 18 Jan 2007 at 2:55, Teo Zenios wrote: There will still be plenty of the things around. One thing that just about guarantees this is the sheer numbers of them sold. So they'll go into basements, attics and barns and forgotten about. Civil War-era brass musical instruments still turn up from time to time--found hanging in a barn, or an attic or serviing as a table lamp. That's after two World Wars and a bunch of smaller ones with scrap brass collection drives. I imagine down the road a couple of decades, we won't have the general-purpose desktop computer in any recognizable form. Computers will largely be embedded in everything--including people's heads. Cheers, Chuck

Chuck Guzis wrote: Perhaps I just have less faith than you in the technology being available in 20 years to probe inside modern systems to figure out how they work and keep them running :-) Take a typical machine from 20 years ago and the datasheets for most of the chips are still available now, the schematics were often published and have survived, very few one-off parts were used, and the level of technology needed to work on the electronics is achievable by us mere mortals. Fast forward 20 years into the future, and I'm not so sure that will be the case; modern machines are a world of "closed source" complexity, using lots of proprietary components and designed to be assembled at the factory and then thrown away when they break. Pretty much anyone can learn how to solder, learn some electronics from any number of books, and get stuck in with old hardware - I just don't see that happening 20 years down the line with the current generation of systems. That means that maintaining these machines will be down to a *very* select few people. It's either that or they need to be available in sufficient numbers so that they can be "fixed" at some sort of board-swapping level, and given that a new PC motherboard seems to come out every week I'm not sure that the numbers of any given board available will be high enough to do that. Sure - but the point is that the understanding is there to repair the ones that do show up. I'm not saying that there aren't specialised techniques involved, but it's within the comprehension of everyday folk to learn those techniques, understand how the object works, and afford the tools needed to carry out the work. A couple of decades down the line I think we're going to have real problems - not just with computers, but with all sorts of modern gadgets - as the complexity is just too high and the necessary knowledge often locked away within companies. Understanding of parts, diagnosing faults, and fixing them won't get any easier I suspect, and sourcing those parts in the first place gets harder each day. cheers Jules

Do you think that tools will not evolve in 20 years? Am I the only optimist on this list? Cripes... -- Will

----- Original Message ----- From: "William Donzelli" <wdonzelli at gmail.com> To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" <cctalk at classiccmp.org> Sent: Thursday, January 18, 2007 3:38 PM Subject: Re: Jules Richardson wrote on "Digital Archaeology of the Microcomputer, 1974-1994 available in keep If we somehow develop technology that uses light instead of electrons to run computing I would think the tools of the new generation will not be able to be used on the older obsolete tech.

Bryan Pope wrote: It would be more likely that you would need to go the other direction. If newer test equipment is using optical technology, you would need to have a device that probes electronically and then translates the signals into optical ones for the new test equipment. Sounds like a round-about way of doing things. Peace... Sridhar

Patrick Finnegan wrote: I have a feeling that getting a circuit like that calibrated properly would be a bit of a bitch. 8-) Peace... Sridhar

While there is a little traqnsition overlap, every generation of technology will always have some incompatibilites with those before and after. On Thu, 18 Jan 2007, William Donzelli wrote: Harrumph. It took a lot for me to get where I am. Why, we only had 0s and 1s, and the 0s were special order, uphill both ways. If it hadn't of been for IBM's patent of the brass roller, we never would have gotten photocell based card readers. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com

On 18 Jan 2007 at 16:00, Teo Zenios wrote: We'll probably be growing our computers out of some kind of soup then. Already, much electronics produced is assembled by machine and not intended to be serviced by human hands. Cheers, Chuck

William Donzelli wrote: Of course they will. But I suspect that there comes a point when you just can't practically figure out the function of some unknown chip for every possible state and input condition in order to emulate it - at least not in reasonable timescales and at reasonable expense. Think of trying now to reverse-engineer something like a 68000 CPU given just a faulty example of the chip and no supporting documentation whatsoever. I don't think that problem will get any harder or easier over the years; the tools readily available will track the advances in hardware fairly closely. But the point is that reverse-engineering a "complex" undocumented chip (from any era) is a difficult task at best, and I think it always will be. We're just fortunate at the moment in that *generally speaking* for "our" vintage equipment there's often documentation available, and any given chip found a home in lots of different systems, so there's a better chance of finding a straight replacement. cheers Jules

These will be cheap in Brazil, believe me... :o?

They will become collectable and historically significant. Everything does, technical or not. It is like a bus sized boulder rolling down a mountain - you can not stop it. -- Will