Building a PC - then & now

[Jon Elson]

On 01/13/2016 04:29 PM, Murray McCullough wrote:
> I was reading in a dated magazine article on the "freedom to build(a
> PC)": Well you can't build phone; can't build a car; can't build a
> refrigerator; can't build a TV. Do we have the freedom to build a
> computer? We did in the earliest days of the PC- the 8-bit era. Heck,
> that's all one could do! It was limited and is to this day. AMD vs
> INTEL control what we can do. Has anything really changed?
>
>
Hmmm, well.  I can build a phone (not a cell phone, of 
course, but a land-line phone is relatively simple.)
Some people have definitely built cars, and gotten them 
licensed.  I have built things that are essentially 
refrigerators.  We have one of those ice cream makers that 
takes about a ton of ice cubes to make one quart of ice 
cream.  I hacked up some refrigeration components to chill 
the brine, which gets re-used.  Works great!

My insane friend Walter turned his Tek RM35 scope into a TV, 
and watched TV on a 5" green screen while he was in 
college.  Hmm, Walter also cloned a Data General Nova with 
piles of TTL chips. Probably very little by AMD or Intel in 
there, either.

Jon