Question for you 'big iron' collectors

From: John Wilson <wilson_at_dbit.dbit.com>
Date: Thu Dec 30 12:19:31 1999

>From: "Paul Braun" <nerdware_at_laidbak.com>

>It just fascinates me that there are so many of you who run these
>beasts and I'd just like to know why.

It's common for people to laugh at the old minis, but the thing is,
back when they first came out everyone thought they were *wicked* cool.
And what's changed? Unless you've gotten seriously behind on maintenance,
they haven't gotten any worse just because the rest of the computing world
has moved ahead (sort of). They're as great as they ever were.

Also, everything that's been done over the last 30 years will all be seen
as totally obsolete 10 years from now, including the seemingly flashy stuff
that's being done right now. The idea of immediately adopting every steaming
pile of new software laid by Bill Gates, just to keep up, doesn't appeal to a
lot of people. So if you're going to pick something to stick with for as long
as possible, why not pick the last system that you were actually *glad* to use?

Then there's the issue of forward compatibility. 5 years ago MS-DOS was
still pretty entrenched, but now it's as if it never existed. There are
supposed DOS compatibility boxes in the newer OSes but they never seem to be
able to run the one program you really care about. I'm sure this will repeat
itself with native Windows etc. applications, and UNIX has always been a moving
target, so if you write your software for one of those systems you'll probably
have to revisit it (and maybe totally rewrite it) every couple of years for
the rest of your life. Even if the OSes don't grow huge incompatibilities
(which they will), the C language itself is long overdue for fading away.
And the real trouble starts when your favorite language falls out of favor --
try to find an Algol compiler nowadays!

But, I assure you that 15 years from now I'll still have some way to run all
of my RT-11 MACRO-11 code unchanged. Just like it's already possible to run
all my stuff from 15 years ago unchanged. New PDP-11 clone CPUs are still
coming out even now (which means they'll depreciate to hobbyist price levels
in a few years), and of course emulators make your code live even longer
(but maybe I'm biased!). The PDP-11 environment is a lot better suited to
being emulated than PCs are, so even though there might be a way to keep
current versions of Windows awake on future non-80x86 CPUs, I still prefer
to write PDP-11 code when it's something I want to bring with me onto future
machines.

John Wilson
D Bit
Received on Thu Dec 30 1999 - 12:19:31 GMT