On Wed, 21 Nov 2018 at 02:57, Michael Brutman via cctalk <cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote: > > Emulators do great things, but they can't replace the visceral > experience of touching real old working hardware. Take the example > the sound of a modem making a 1200 bps connection, or the grinding > noise of a floppy drive zero-track seeking at bootup. Or how > inconvenient it is to shuffle floppy disks around. Or the slightly > out of focus look of a CRT monitor. (If you focused one area, you put > another area out of focus ...)
I agree... but with an exception that came as a slight surprise to me when I first encountered it. I learned VMS and Fortran on a VAX 11-780 cluster in the mid-1980s. I used the computers daily for 3 years, but I never once saw them. They were hidden away in a back room, tended, I used to imagine, by operators in white lab coats, probably with very neat hair and heavy black-rimmed spectacles. So the first time that I used an emulated VAX over a serial line from a real DEC terminal, I was struck by how the experience was 100% faithful to the original. P.S. Please bottom-post, will you? -- Liam Proven - Profile: https://about.me/liamproven Email: lpro...@cix.co.uk - Google Mail/Hangouts/Plus: lpro...@gmail.com Twitter/Facebook/Flickr: lproven - Skype/LinkedIn: liamproven UK: +44 7939-087884 - ČR (+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal): +420 702 829 053
