Trivia Question

From: Jim Battle <frustum_at_pacbell.net>
Date: Fri Feb 21 16:16:00 2003

At 01:46 PM 2/21/03 -0800, Eric Smith wrote:
>"Andy Holt" <andyh_at_andyh-rayleigh.freeserve.co.uk> wrote:
> > the Poqet was definitely a "real" computer (PC compat).
>
>That's quite a sad definition of "real computer". Any one of my
>PDP-8 or PDP-11 systems, even the wimpiest, is much more of a "real
>computer" than any PC compatible will ever be.

OK, Eric, you've just exposed yourself as an utter snob. :-)

Yeah, the PC started off ugly and has accreted even more baggage, but to
deny that it is a real computer is ridiculous.

If you were to time travel to 1970 and find a lab using a PDP-8 doing some
kind of computational work, and ask them if they'd want to trade it in for
a 3 GHz PC that you brought back with you from the future, I have no doubt
that they'd take the PC and they'd find a way to make it work, despite the
I/O and software differences.

I've had the discussion with workmates about the following scenario. If
the German forces had access to a single 5150 IBM PC back in 1940, would
the war have ended very differently? I think it would have. Now we
dismiss that much computational power as inconsequential.

Ignoring all of that, why are you bringing up the PDP-8 and -11 in the
context of computers that weigh under 1 kg?

-----
Jim Battle == frustum_at_pacbell.net
Received on Fri Feb 21 2003 - 16:16:00 GMT