I suspect there's correlation, but I also suspect that the causality behind it is not as implied by that phrasing. Rather, it seems to me that the machines that one is attached to will be the ones that one gets to know at all available levels. For example, I know more than I really want to about the 8080 at the assembly/machine level - there was a time when I could read 8080 code in hex, without needing to explicitly disassemble it. But I don't feel nostalgic for the 8080, nor any of the machines I've used that were built around it. But the VAX, on the other hand, I am quite fond of, and I know it at pretty much all available levels in every incarnation I've run into. (I went through my larval stage under VMS, and when a friend recently gave me some VAX kit that had VMS on it, I found I remembered more VMS after some twenty years of not touching it than he, who had worked with it within the last few years, did.) I'm not sure the indifference you (and I) see is actually present. I suspect that what's going on there is that there are about as many people really interested in computers and computing as before, but these days it's harder for them to see one another because they're drowned out by the hordes of "computer people" who are just in it to get a decent-paying job and couldn't really care less about the stuff for its own sake. /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents.montreal.qc.ca / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B

I think for some of us it does, I have "fond spots" for various systems that I spent untold time digging into every details of .... however I think that it may be more because "thats what we do" than a special thing about low- level activity in general. I get frequent emails from people who tell me about how a photo on my site has stirred fond memories of long-gone systems. Most of these are assembly types. I get authors telling me how they wrote their first books on such and such a machine. Others tell me about varous software packages that they liked. Each found the machine unique and interesting for different reasons realting to what they used them for. Computers used to be special - If you didn't have one, you worked to get into a position where you could use one. Off-time at the job site, or gettng to know the lucky SOB across town who has one. Some of us designed and built our own as it was the fastesst way to get "a machine". Each setup was different, different cards, prcoessors, system software - all unique and highly interesting. You would spend days/weeks/months figuring out how "everything worked". There was a certain joy in the creative aspect of doing a lot of it yourself as well. I wrote my own OS's, languages, tools, utilities and lots more - just because I found it fun. Now computers are more common than toasters (really - most of the people I know have more computers than toasters) - did you find your toaster especially interesting in the "old days"? Want a computer? - Just take a stroll down a few city streets on the evening before trash pickup. Unique - Yeah, if you count that fact that system A) has a different video driver and consequently exhibits different apparently unrelated bugs than system B) ... Want to understand everything about it? - good luck just disassembling the BIOS - not to mention the 100megs of "os". Want datasheets on the proprietary chips in the various peripherals - good luck (here's your winblows driver, have a nice day - and don't forget to update it from our web site). Want to write your own code - OK, this huge stack of manuals (excuse me - PDF files) is an approcimation of the API specs for the library that hides the undocumented details of the OS from you, yeah it seems daunting, but just pickup up a "learn to design complex software systems in 21 days" book - feh... computers are no longer interesting - they are overly complicated bug-ridden toasters. (but generally not as useful). Dave -- dave06a (at) Dave Dunfield dunfield (dot) Firmware development services & tools: www.dunfield.com com Collector of vintage computing equipment: http://www.classiccmp.org/dunfield/index.html

Well, I am really only interested in machines where I can 'get among the hardware' -- the lower the level the better.And I do try to appreciate interesting design. One reason I like the PERQ is that it's a user-microprogrammable CPU, another is that the design is so darn elegant. One reason I like the HP98x0 is that they're one of the few common bit-serial machines. My dislike of modern hardware comes from the fact you can't get among it. Big custom chips with no data sheets (and even if there were, I couldn't put my 'scope proble on the point I wanted to look at because it's inside an IC). Darn it, with BGAs I can't even probe the connections to the ICs. -tony