Demography?

From: Captain Napalm <spc_at_armigeron.com>
Date: Sun Mar 1 16:23:19 1998

It was thus said that the Great Doug Yowza once stated:
>
> Hi, I'm Doug, and I'm a computerholic.

  Hi Doug. I'm Sean, and I'm a computerholic as well 8-)

> BTW, here's my theory of why now is an interesting time to be a collector:
> the computer is now so mainstream that innovation is occuring only in very
> narrow areas. As far as architecure goes, general purpose scalar machines
> are the only ones to survive. RIP: writeable control stores, dataflow
> architectures, LISP engines, connection machines, object-oriented
> architecures, etc. If you don't get your hands on one of these recently
> extinct dinosaurs soon, forget it. As far as form factor goes, I can't
> think of any reason that everybody won't be using laptops in the next few
> years, so now's a good time to collect ancient form factors as well as a
> good time to collect early instances of the first of the new generation.

Writable control stores: Don't count these out just yet. The new HP
machines based upon the HP-PA stuff does have a writable control store. My
friend has one of these boxes at home and he's been planning on playing
around with this.

OO-architectues: While interesting, they have the problem of being slower
than their non-OO counterparts (in the same era). The Intel 432 sounds
interesting, but from what I hear, it made for a slow system. But again,
don't count this as being dead as Sun has made CPUs that run Java natively
(or rather, the JVM, which enforces the OO paradigm).

  Give some of these things time. They typically don't hit mainstream until
20, 25 years after being first introduced.

  -spc (Java is just another variation on UCSD Pascal ... )
Received on Sun Mar 01 1998 - 16:23:19 GMT