[EXTERNAL] VCF PNW 2019: Exhibitors needed!

[Liam Proven]

On Wed, 21 Nov 2018 at 02:57, Michael Brutman via cctalk
<cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
>
> Emulators do great things, but they can't replace the visceral
> experience of touching real old working hardware.  Take the example
> the sound of a modem making a 1200 bps connection, or the grinding
> noise of a floppy drive zero-track seeking at bootup.  Or how
> inconvenient it is to shuffle floppy disks around.  Or the slightly
> out of focus look of a CRT monitor.  (If you focused one area, you put
> another area out of focus ...)

I agree... but with an exception that came as a slight surprise to me
when I first encountered it.

I learned VMS and Fortran on a VAX 11-780 cluster in the mid-1980s. I
used the computers daily for 3 years, but I never once saw them. They
were hidden away in a back room, tended, I used to imagine, by
operators in white lab coats, probably with very neat hair and heavy
black-rimmed spectacles.

So the first time that I used an emulated VAX over a serial line from
a real DEC terminal, I was struck by how the experience was 100%
faithful to the original.

P.S. Please bottom-post, will you?

-- 
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