Keelan Lightfoot wrote:
>
> >   Keelan, if I could find a PDP-8, I'd shoot it so it doesn't breed ;-)
> >I never want to see punched tapes or cards again. I never want to type on
> >a TTY again, ever... I never want to see a DEC or ADAM-3 terminal again.
> >I like what I have now and I never want to go back. So there ;-)
>
> LOL!!! I am bored of what I have now, and want to get a taste of what came
> before :) I am 18, and unfortunately, my entire life has been microchips,
> miniaturization, microcomputers, smaller smaller smaller, faster and less
> fun for someone with a soldering iron and a bucket of components. I want
> something big, something that hurts me if I drop it on my foot, something
> that reads a medium that I can manually edit, something that flashes lights
> and lets me know it is working! I find modern computers great for computing
> but horrible for experimenting. I have to tip-toe around a modern OS chewing
> on 24 megabytes of RAM, and I can't do anything stupid like divide by 0
> without the OS going crazy, crashing and taking a month to reboot just so
> that I can divide by 0 again.
>
> - Keelan Lightfoot

You want something big that hurts you if you drop it on your foot?  Glue
a 745 pound lead brick onto your current machine's base, Keelan - You
think the older machines were any better?  Aieee!  <G>  You knew you
were having a BAD day when, on the 15th try, you finally figured out
that the reason your S-100 machine's 5-minute boot program entry through
front panel switches wasn't working right was that you had a bit stuck
on in a $35, 4k SRAM chip.  Then you replaced that, and one of the
voltage regulators on another memory card went out.  Then you finally
got 'er to boot up, tried running JRT Pascal, and had it gripe, while
compiling your 1200 line program for about 3700 seconds, 11 times out of
12, that I := I + J + K - 1; was "Expression too complex for compiler to
parse" - and the 12th time, it'd compile just fine, no source code
changes.  On a good day, you'd buy Turbo Pascal 1.0, slide that 8"
floppy in, tell it to load the source, hit Compile, and then yell
"Baloney" when it compiled that code in about 45 seconds - then bounce
your jaw off the floor when you "called it's bluff", and hit Run, and it
DID.  (Still have that floppy somewhere <G>)

Seriously, except for Winxx, you didn't miss a whole lot, in many
ways...  Though I do think a Cray-1 would be a fun machine to run a
Flight sim on.

Enjoy yourself, either way.

  Mark