List charter mods & headcount... ;-)

From: Tony Duell <ard_at_p850ug1.demon.co.uk>
Date: Wed Jun 16 17:28:34 2004

>
> > Thank Gawd for that.
> Unix *IS* user-friendly, it's just picky about who it calls a friend ;)

:-)

>
> I'm thinking of several ways to avoid this becoming a windows support area.
> I'm not hip on windows being a valid topic here, or commodity clone PC's for
> a lot of reasons. Key of which is that in my opinion, that system is
> responsible for the decline of the true art of computer science (but albeit
> the rise of giant computer industry). The systems, and in general a lot of
> the software after that are so cookie-cutter as to not have any soul. While
> faster, cheaper, etc... there are no really new ideas in them. Just
> reapplication of age old concepts. It's the period when these age old
> concepts were discovered, put forth, and formed that we really seek to
> preserve.

Agreed.

I am primarily a hardware person, but I guess much of the below applies
to classic software too but I am not qualified to comment on that.

I am somewhat unusual (I won't say unique because I know there's at least
one other person here who does this) in that I pull classic computers
apart (non-destructively !). Really apart, and then investigate what I
can see. If there are no schematics, well I produce a set 99% of the
time.

And much of the time, when I'm working on a classic, I discover something
which I consider beautiful, or at least interesting for the time. Some
optimisation, either to increase performance with the technology then
available (e.g. in the PDP11/45), or to reduce component count (e.g. the
fact that the HP9810 uses half as many RAM chips as you might expect) or....

I _don't_ get this feeling when I look inside a PC. Any PC.

>
> One can make a good case for the initial home PC market - c64, apple, exidy,
> atari, trs80, etc... as being historically significant. One simply can't

Please don't forget Acorn (and I suppose I'd better mention Sinclair and
Amstrad, although their machines are not in the same class as Acorn...)

> make that argument for later generic clone PC's.
>
> In my mind, most of us here wish to preserve the ART of computer science,

One of the oldest computer preservation groups in the world (18 years old
now), although founded by a hardware hacker, has the aim of 'preserving
old computers, software and operating practices as far as possible'. Yes,
there's a lot more that needs to be preserved other than boards of chips
(or trasnsistors, or valves, or...)

> not necessarily machines of a specific age - thus I think an age limit isn't
> really a great way to do this. Also, I think IBM 5150's are on topic for
> example. It's a nebulous thing to pin down. Easy to understand but hard to
> express.
>
> I don't think any of us started collecting with the first idea being "I'm
> going to collect systems that are 10 years old". We aimed for specific

Actually I started because I realised that unless _somebody_ started
preserving these old machines then 30 years of history was going to get
lost. And rather than simply say that, I started grabbing all I could
find. Particularly minicomputers.

-tony
Received on Wed Jun 16 2004 - 17:28:34 BST