At 16:05 -0600 1/28/05, news_at_computercollector.com wrote:
>RE: people who use classic computers as their primary machine, not including
>those of you on the list who work for computer museums -- I'm very curious how
>many of you exist. And, do you use classic computers by 1.) choice, 2.) lack
>of budget, or 3.) technological need (that is, legacy connectivity)...?
Yo. I have two machines, a laptop G4 and an 040 NeXT Cube. The NeXT
does Mathematica modelling on an occasional basis, and runs a perl
script weekly to generate commands to send to the IMAGE spacecraft.
The laptop *could* do both, of course, but: a) The Mathematica code
was developed on Mathematica 3 and function changes mean it won't run
on Mathematica 5, current for Mac OS X on the laptop until/unless I
update it, and b) the perl scripts grab a bunch of files via ftp, so
it's actually faster to modem into the NeXT and run it there than to
run in local (grabbing files across the modem) on the laptop when I'm
on the road.
So I'm mostly in category 1) (choice), but there are some elements of
3) in there as well. The NeXT was introduced for reason 2), since I
got Mathematica 3 on it at a pretty good price originally and wanted
to avoid spending money for a recent edition thereof for the first
use.
--
- Mark
210-522-6025, temporary cell 240-375-2995
Received on Fri Feb 04 2005 - 10:30:34 GMT