> I do use my old machines now and then, but if anyone here has never ran a
> modern MAC or PC, they have NO idea what is bieng missed. web pages in full
> photo quality color, realistic games, PPP connections, Realaudio etc. I am
I have used 'modern' PC's (well, at least pentiums with 16 MBytes RAM,
SVGA card, etc), and I know I'm not missing _anything_ by sticking to
classic computers. Let's go through your points.
'Web pages in full photo quality colour'. Well, I access the web to get
information, not look at pretty pictures. Most of the information I want
is _text_, or at least monochrome graphics (things like IC data sheets).
So I don't need 'photo quality colour'. And if I did, I could easily find
a classic system that could display them. Evans and Sutherland, Grinnell,
Ramtek, I2S, PPL, etc all made high-res colour displays that make most
PC's look like toys. And you can pick one up second-hand for less than an
SVGA card + monitor.
'Realistic games'. I don't play many games, but I'll agree that modern
games running on modern hardware do _look_ a lot more realistic than the
text+block graphics we had on home computers 15 years ago. The problem is
that IMHO (and YMMV) the old games are just more fun to play. That's a
personal judgement, though.
'PPP connections' Oh come on. I've run a PPP client on an _XT_. No problem
at all. I'll happily believe they're available for other old machines as
well.
'Realaudio' I assume that's some audio standard for modern machines. But
we had good quality audio on PDP11's (thanks to a little board from 3RCC)
in 1976. It's not exactly hard to add a DAC and a DMA engine or even a DSP
to a lot of classic computers (and classic computer != cheap home micro so
there's easily enough RAM space for a reasonable length sample).
What I'd be missing by going to a modern machine would be :
Documentation. Since I don't just run prepackaged software and plug in
prebuilt hardware, I need good technical manuals. They just don't exist
for most modern machines
Repairability. I can fix classic computers with no problem at all. Just
try getting a custom chip for a PC motherboard. And don't tell me to
replace the motherboard - if the PC is a few years old I'd probably have
to replace the CPU and memory as well.
--
-tony
ard12_at_eng.cam.ac.uk
The gates in my computer are AND,OR and NOT, not Bill
Received on Fri Jun 27 1997 - 08:59:06 BST