R. D. Davis wrote:
> ...and emulators are very, very, boring; and, if run under M$-Windoze,
> much less reliable and more likely to crash or lose data. The sound
> of fans, the chatter and kerchunking of disk drives, the clicking
> contactors when mains power is applied, the vacuum and whirring sounds
> of a mag tape drive starting up, the blinking of lights, etc. are all
> parts of the experience of using vintage computer systems.
Sure and I've even seen PDP8 emulation that clicked the teletype sounds
and and ran an Xterm window in 110 baud. (well, perhaps I was dreaming
on the sounds part).
If I smelled thoe overheated fans I'd have thought it was a real PDP8e.
As far as the windows part it isn't what I'm running (unless I have to
for work). My Vaxstation's starting to look like fun -- but I do miss
the PDP11/03 front end rx01 init clicks and the microdiagnostics.
But I can't afford the space or power for one in order to run the
microdiags to test wcs.
I did RT11 on the RT11 emulator on the Vax at DEC and the sysgens seemed
just the same as the ones on the 11/40 I used when I could borrow
it in the Princeton office and the emulated RT11 box could write files
to the floppy on the 11/780 that I could boot on my home PDT11/150.
Couldn't do that with the RK05's, RL02's and RM02's on the 11/40.
Bill
bill
---
Bill Gates is a Persian cat and a monocle away from being a
villain in a James Bond movie -- Dennis Miller
bpechter_at_shell.monmouth.com|pechter_at_pechter.dyndns.org
Received on Thu Jul 26 2001 - 19:04:18 BST