Hrm, interesting but I was hoping for a bit more. These are mostly collectors keeping things around for nostalgia purposes. I was hoping to hear more about legitimate systems being run on 20/30/40 year old systems.
Yeah, military and space hardware feels like a given. You could always say the Voyager is the oldest running program.
I'd be more interested to hear about computers that are in use being actively changed, with new software coming out on them to support whatever unique need they have.
That or highly specialized one-trick-ponies that cannot change due to their complex nature.
The military mass producing 100,000 <insert thing> from the 70's with computers on them, or a person maintaining their BBS doesn't really feel the same.
Z80 family has been in continuous production since '76 mostly in embedded devices since the 80s. Even today someone's probably writing a new photocopier controller or a thermostat or something for a Z80.
The allen bradley/rockwell 500 series PLCs have been in continuous production since the 90s, lets say the 5/01 has been made from '95 (although probably earlier?) till today as far as I know, so that's 18 continuous years of production. They're pretty simple but sometimes that's all you need.
If you allow a compatible family orientation, the first vax rolled off the assembly line in '77 and the last in '05 so thats a good 28 years of continuous production. Of course thats a trap, I would imagine "PC/XT compatible" boards will be made basically eternally for embedded work, etc.
The market is tiny, and mostly hobbyist focused, but there is even the occasional commercial software release, now often targetting AROS and MorphOS (AmigaOS inspired OS's) too. For example:
The Amiga community is interesting because there is a distinct split between different factions, with some insisting on only supporting "classics" (the M68k machines) and sometimes reimplementations (there's a series of FPGA based projects), some only interested in the current generation PPC systems (from AEon and ACube), as well as AROS and MorphOS camps, and those only interested in emulation.
Of course a lot of people couldn't care less about the various splits and just want to get on with things, but this is a community where you will find people actively using anything from 7.16MHz A500's to high end PC's to run OS's that are widely source compatible and that either directly runs or have some level of integrated emulation capability for old M68k apps, and where a lot of the community still run and/or tinker with software that was released back in 1985 (e.g. there are people still tweaking the original roms to cut more cycles off the odd system call...).
It may not be "broke", but a lot of the time with these ancient systems ongoing maintenance costs more than replacement would - but quarterly accounting ensures anyone who did the smart thing would be punished for it.
> quarterly accounting ensures anyone who did the smart thing would be punished for it
It occurs to me--is there some sort of financial instrument a company could buy (or sell) which would incentivize them to take a longer-term view of their own performance?
The one thing that comes to mind is Enron's scheme of selling debt backed by the integral of future projected profits from an energy contract, and then writing that debt-asset down as current-quarter earnings. It did overvalue their stock, but it also locked them into a model where contracts with declining long-term outlooks would force a loss, rather than just a declining gain.
That doesn't seem like a glowing recommendation, I admit--but an overvalue of the stock in this case could actually be the "economically correct" value; it could just be incorporating the company's potential upside for being forced to take a longer-term view, and rewarding the participants for taking on increased downside risk.
The stock price, in an efficient market (that is, one that understands what it's investing in, unlike what happened with Enron) would also be offset with lower demand due to said increased risk--but a company could still come out slightly better off for establishing these instruments. It just comes down to whether other short-term investors actually value a company that "goes long" more than a regular quarter-to-quarter-earnings one.
>is there some sort of financial instrument a company could buy (or sell) which would incentivize them to take a longer-term view of their own performance?
>It occurs to me--is there some sort of financial instrument a company could buy (or sell) which would incentivize them to take a longer-term view of their own performance?
ESOP. When the stockholders are the employees, quarterly earnings take a back seat to making sure the company will still be successful 30 years from now when they retire.
That sort of platform migration should be handled using some sort of capex methodology. We are in the midst of four ERP migrations (at four facilities) and their funding is expensed out over 10 years to keep from taking a big initial hit to the books.
When I was in high school in the late 70s, my school canceled their support contract for their PDP-8e, and supposedly that year's support contract money was sufficient to buy a handful of Apple IIs.
I've kept every single computer I've owned. Still thrilled with how well my Zeos 386 notebook (from the early 90's) works w/ Linux and that ultra thin Sharp PC-UM10 (from '01) that looks like a small MacBook Air and has an 8-hour battery life.
> and that ultra thin Sharp PC-UM10 (from '01) that looks like a small MacBook Air and has an 8-hour battery life
You should definitely do a write up on how you're getting 8 hours out of a PC-UM10. Didn't they get like 3 hours under Windows? I could use a simple Linux laptop, even if it's terminal only.
I really wish I had done this. Besides my embedded systems (now I'm casually collecting industrial "computers"), the only non-PC computer I have is an SGI Indigo. It's pretty and all, but I wish I had held on to all the old varieties of Radio Shack/Tandy computers I owned.
The punchcard system surprised me, but I've seen plenty of Apple II and C64 systems used as standalone in small businesses, and various minicomputers are quite understandable (although most of the normal environment VAX stuff got moved to Alphas in the 1990s, which aren't that horrible from a maintenance perspective).
IBM seems to have a penchant for that, their series i computers run software written for even the previous system/36 and system/38. The i relies on a Technology-Independent Machine Interface to allow the hardware to change without requiring code changes at the software, for many release upgrades user written code simply is recompiled when the upgrade is done without source being needed or user action.
Yeah, the backward-compatibility lengths that IBM goes to are something amazing and wonderful to behold. I think a lot of developers these days don't appreciate the crazy work that into supporting bytecode from before they were born.
IBM's penchant for providing bit-and-millisecond-perfect reverse compatibility back to the 60s is built on the fact that their customers will pay very, very, very high prices for it.
I used to work for EDS (now HP Enterprise Services) about 6 years ago sub-contracting for Xerox. Most of the systems they (Xerox) used for selling/maintenance (order processing, invoicing, etc) of printers were written in COBOL for the IBM System/360 mainframes (which I think were replaced by the System/Zs).
In defense of those IT departments. It usually comes down to some ancient ERM software that only works in one version of IE with one version of Java (or ActiveX). Management has decided it is cheaper to use a pwned version of IE than pay a contractor to update the software.
I used to work in a place that use SAP-like software called MFP Pro that was implemented in IE6 days. Six-figure pricetag. We developed all our business processes around it, and they screwed us on support (which can be summed up by "Here's a URL to the link with the patches, we won't even email you when there's an update"). So we weren't going to give them more business when they came up with a better version... but we didn't have enough money to move to something else (once you factor in training costs etc). I left in 2009, and it was still running on an NT4 machine.
We did look at some cheaper options, but it's interesting that the manufacture of electronic systems doesn't really have anything cheap in the space. Properly managing nested BOMs of an arbitrary depth? Pretty much always a high pricetag or something you have to hack yourself...
We had a young'un who just graduated college who we hired and recently raised a ruckus about someone using IE8 in the field. I shook my head and silently thanked the powers that be here that we got rid of our WinXP userbase before he got here. Otherwise that poor fella would have had a heart attack. Laddie, you ain't got it bad until you've had to work with IE6.
They could still be right, though. Keep IE6 for that piece-of-shit enterprise web apps and still install Chrome or Firefox for the rest of your work.
IE6 just becomes the shell to the webapp instead of a browser in its own right. MS probably even has a way to install multiple versions of IE concurrently so you could run IE6 + "modern IE".
Yes, I don't know if MS makes it or another vendor, but you can get IE version whatever with an embedded IE 6. I've been at two companies now where this solution has been proposed.
Actually, this is something I've been curious about for awhile: I know "modern IE" comes with developer tools that allow you to switch IE versions, and essentially look at the site at hand as if you were using IE8 or IE7, all the way down to IE6. From my understanding, a website can manually trigger this switch by using a special <meta> tag. Can't these legacy systems that only work in IE6 simply use the appropriate <meta> tag and have things work? What are the differences between using straight up IE6 and the IE6 rendering engine in IE8?
Ha! It's a nice thought, but the various compatibility modes are not actually identical to the real versions of the browsers. Close, yes, but there are bugs/features that only show up in the real versions.
During my brief stint at a POS provider, I was in charge of an OS/2 Warp system. This was last year, and the client using the system was a pretty major clothing retailer. never thought I'd have to learn Rexx in 2012.
I think my first experience with programming was a Rexx app on an old Palm OS device back in elementary school. I made an interactive fiction game, if I remember correctly.
My HP-48sx is 21 years old and I still use it roughly daily at home.
I have an emulator on my phone but the tactile response of the keys is awful and the display and keyboard are tiny compared to the "real" thing.
Its just too easy to use. Latency of the calc on my phone is very high compared to a fraction of a second. If my desktop is up and running and logged in and a webbrowser is running (lots of ifs) then google and wolfram alpha are starting to eat into the 48's territory. But it still gets plenty of use. Batteries last about a year.
I also have a 32Sii at the workbench vaguely 90s vintage.
My son (in high school) took into use a HP-15c that my wife bought in 1987. Alas, it broke after travelling back and forth between home and school for a few months. A true loss, but it wasn't as strong as I thought it would be.
In 1985, I was preparing for the matriculation exam (at end of high school). I was worried that my Sharp EL-506 battery would run out in the middle of this important exam, because it was already 3 years old. However, I did not change it. It lasted the matriculation exam. It lasted also my MSc studies and army, 9 years altogether. And beginning of my working career. And it actually still works, though nowadays I don't need it so it's just at the bottom of the drawer. But it is OK, 31 years after buying it, with original batteries and some significant use during high school and uni. I just don't understand.
My HP-42S calculator is 23 years old and I keep it at home than bring it anywhere as it can be snatched easily and sell on eBay for 3x the original price!
TI has a pretty good gig going since they're selling a "calculator" and not a "computer". "Calulators" don't follow the same market dynamics as "computers", so as long as everyone in that market plays along and competes on features (or no one adds features) they should be able to maintain their margins ad infinitum
I used one of those DEC VAX machines when I was in the military. When considering when they were built they have REALLY REALLY nice GUI. They were built around the time of the first Macs and their interface is significantly higher resolution and more user freindly than those first Macs. They are really nice machines and not terribly big (roughly the size of a small refrigerator).
The money that you paid for one of those first Macs wouldn't buy you a power supply for a DEC VAX. So it's remarkable that Apple managed to commercialize GUIs at a price for the masses, even if their version had lower specs.
"Well, in our country," said Alice, still panting a little, "you'd generally get to somewhere else — if you run very fast for a long time, as we've been doing."
"A slow sort of country!" said the Queen. "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!"
In 2001, I was going from one Intel factory to another, teaching Nikon technicians about VMS, which ran on the Alpha stations Nikon was still putting into its steppers (big machines used to make computer chips). They switched over to Windows NT and Linux a few years later, but I'm sure many of those VMS-based steppers are still operating.
(Open)VMS was still being developed, sold and commercially supported at that time and several years afterwards, and HP still offers commercial support and made (so far) last release in 2010, so that's not so "ancient". HP also kept selling Alpha based hardware until at least 2007.
I have it on good authority (actually I don't remember any of the details except that I found it funny) that routine configuration of various machines inside the most advanced semiconductor fabrication facility in the world was done via hand-carried 3.5" floppy disks as recently as last year.
If it works, it works. The cost to "upgrading" something like this is staggeringly high when you factor in the likelihood that the change is going to break something.
Edit: No, apparently it was switched off in 2010, I remember talking to somebody from their IT department back in 2008 when that computer was functioning, didn't know that they actually shut it down now.
* I know a person still running their entire businesses off an old HP-41 series calculator and an accounting book.
* A company I worked for in 2003 was running their entire DHCP off a 1985 built VAX. It worked and hadn't been rebooted for 15 years.
* Until well into the 00's, most UK rail timetable displays across the UK were running off circa 1985 BBC Micros. The following display was quite a regular occurrence: http://www.ntk.net/2000/07/14/dohtrain.jpg
Just because it's old, doesn't mean it doesn't work and leaving it isn't the most cost effective thing to do.
A couple of years ago I wandered down the wrong aisle in one of our data centres and came upon a Data General Eclipse still powered up and apparently in use.
Reading "The Soul of a New Machine" [1], the story of building the successor to the Eclipse, when I was 13/14 was what made me want to work with computers, although I couldn't decide whether hardware or software was cooler. DEC had already won by that point, though. I even acquired a DEC Rainbow 100+ as my first "PC" (it was a hybrid 8088 / Z80 which could boot DEC's DOS or CP/M).
A couple of years ago my father and I scrapped the last of the Rainbows (not rare enough for a museum to be interested) and a Micro PDP 11/23 (no interest from museums or UK PDP enthusiasts, and too hard to ship internationally). It was a sad day.
You know, you get points for reading the book but lose points for buying a Rainbow :-) (kidding) Fortunately you didn't buy the PDP-11 version which ran the "Personal Operating System" (which was a lobotomized version of RSX-11, and aptly abbreviated to POS)
I agree that its a great book, these days it would be much less dramatic with everything running on simulators prior to chip tapeout.
Haha, the Rainbow was a skip-rescue, as was the PDP (which rain RSX-11M). Even came with the "orange wall" of manuals. Made a nice space heater, and we had fun running RS232 all over the house to attach terminals to it. Sadly it didn't have a compiler, only Macro-11...
"The Soul of a New Machine" is a great book, about a topic that wouldn't seem that interesting. I second (third?) the recommendation.
My Mom worked at Data General and she used to take home some transparent masks for chips that were "corporate trash". She made art out of them and they're still hanging in her house.
Reading "The Soul of a New Machine" [1], the story of building the successor to the Eclipse, when I was 13/14 was what made me want to work with computers, although I couldn't decide whether hardware or software was cooler.
Same here, pretty much. That was a very influential book for me. I went back and read it again a couple of years ago, and it was still fascinating. Then I found out a guy at our local Hackerspace was there during some of that time and knows some of the folks mentioned in the book. That made it all seem even more real to me... quite an interesting story in any case.
The best paying job offers I've ever received are for senior COBOL positions (but I'm no senior, I just took a course and had the bad idea to list it on my CV :P ).
Last month I had the pleasure I of seeing a Dekatron[1] in action (for those that don't know, a dekatron is a decimal based computer, rather than binary). The machine in question is the oldest working computer in the world (older machines like the Colossus are actually reconstructions) and uses relays rather than valves. It was a true sight to see in action as the relays spin round with a hypnotic orange glow[2]
Ah yes. I'm getting myself in a muddle as WITCH was/is a relay-based dekatron computer. (how that all hangs together is beyond me. But it looked immense).
The operator very kindly let my girlfriend and I manually control it!
There's a button on a long wire which you could click to advance the current program a single step. You could watch the RAM spin and flicker and the relays(?) 'clack' through the computations :-D
They let everyone play with the stepping control :) (myself included)
It's a great museum because of how massively hands on it is. I can't think of many other places that have that high percentage of exhibits which are there for kids (and adults) to play on.
My computer club at university runs our DNS server on a MicroVAX II machine. If you're patient, you can use SSH to log in, and when you're in, you got the choice betweeen vi and ed to edit files. vi of course take ages to load.
Back in the late 80's, early 90's, a friend of mine bought some used PDP-11/70's from Illinois Bell. He'd sell them as parts into the aftermarket and did okay. Not great but steady.
He kept one in his detached garage that would load the initial bootstrap and then prompt the console for the operating system, which he didn't have. From that point on it patiently waited for a response and was used to heat the garage.
Fortunately, a friend of mine had kept his old PDP-11 and was able to retrieve some files for me from some old media that I'd overlooked transferring decades ago.
Son, disruption is exactly the antithesis of what motivates these folks to use these machines. The bombs may fall, the solar winds may fry the network, but that blasted 402 will keep clicking and ticking into doomsday given the opportunity and maintenance.
Yep, the many miles of wire inside old mainframes and scientific computers (CDC, Cray, etc.) were all hand-soldered wire by wire, connector by connector, mostly by women. Must have been seen as requiring similar skills as sewing or weaving.
A 25-year old Amiga 2000 still provides background music at home (when the wife is away). A couple hundred megs of Mod files provide hours of nostalgia. Some people meditate with incense, Amigans ruminate to the sounds of 80s tracker beats.
I've tried replacing the machine with emulation, but there is something comforting in seeing the old girl in the corner serving as well as she ever did. Perhaps devices living beyond their natural lifespans comforts man's worries over his own perishable nature.
Not just Amiga, .mod music crossed over into the PC community as well quite robustly, once Sound Blaster cards with digital output entered the market around 1991. I never had an Amiga but I've still got a couple hundred .mods from the BBS and demo scene days, that are still in regular rotation in Winamp. My eternal favorite, Elysium by Jester: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zTtjvbAvsys
They do make great coding music. Not coincidentally, .mods resemble code, being in a way code themselves, with tightly structured and repetitive patterns but also with their own creativity flowing over the top.
It's been about eight years since I last saw one in use, but I wouldn't be surprised to still find Amigas with Video Toasters being used for live video switching and overlays.
Paradox, the legendary DnB producer is still touring the world with his c64, his akai sampler and zip/floppy disks, destroying dancefloors with live tracker sequences. Here's a little video of him at the Sun and Bass event in sardina, showing you his setup: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2e0wg_618ac
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 189 ms ] threadI'd be more interested to hear about computers that are in use being actively changed, with new software coming out on them to support whatever unique need they have.
That or highly specialized one-trick-ponies that cannot change due to their complex nature.
The military mass producing 100,000 <insert thing> from the 70's with computers on them, or a person maintaining their BBS doesn't really feel the same.
The allen bradley/rockwell 500 series PLCs have been in continuous production since the 90s, lets say the 5/01 has been made from '95 (although probably earlier?) till today as far as I know, so that's 18 continuous years of production. They're pretty simple but sometimes that's all you need.
If you allow a compatible family orientation, the first vax rolled off the assembly line in '77 and the last in '05 so thats a good 28 years of continuous production. Of course thats a trap, I would imagine "PC/XT compatible" boards will be made basically eternally for embedded work, etc.
AmigaOS is still being commercially developed, though it 'only' dates back to 1985: http://hyperion-entertainment.biz/
And there's new hardware for it: http://www.a-eon.com/ http://acube-systems.biz/
The market is tiny, and mostly hobbyist focused, but there is even the occasional commercial software release, now often targetting AROS and MorphOS (AmigaOS inspired OS's) too. For example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_(programming_language...
The Amiga community is interesting because there is a distinct split between different factions, with some insisting on only supporting "classics" (the M68k machines) and sometimes reimplementations (there's a series of FPGA based projects), some only interested in the current generation PPC systems (from AEon and ACube), as well as AROS and MorphOS camps, and those only interested in emulation.
Of course a lot of people couldn't care less about the various splits and just want to get on with things, but this is a community where you will find people actively using anything from 7.16MHz A500's to high end PC's to run OS's that are widely source compatible and that either directly runs or have some level of integrated emulation capability for old M68k apps, and where a lot of the community still run and/or tinker with software that was released back in 1985 (e.g. there are people still tweaking the original roms to cut more cycles off the odd system call...).
It occurs to me--is there some sort of financial instrument a company could buy (or sell) which would incentivize them to take a longer-term view of their own performance?
The one thing that comes to mind is Enron's scheme of selling debt backed by the integral of future projected profits from an energy contract, and then writing that debt-asset down as current-quarter earnings. It did overvalue their stock, but it also locked them into a model where contracts with declining long-term outlooks would force a loss, rather than just a declining gain.
That doesn't seem like a glowing recommendation, I admit--but an overvalue of the stock in this case could actually be the "economically correct" value; it could just be incorporating the company's potential upside for being forced to take a longer-term view, and rewarding the participants for taking on increased downside risk.
The stock price, in an efficient market (that is, one that understands what it's investing in, unlike what happened with Enron) would also be offset with lower demand due to said increased risk--but a company could still come out slightly better off for establishing these instruments. It just comes down to whether other short-term investors actually value a company that "goes long" more than a regular quarter-to-quarter-earnings one.
I think restricted stock is basically that.
ESOP. When the stockholders are the employees, quarterly earnings take a back seat to making sure the company will still be successful 30 years from now when they retire.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employee_ownership
That won't last long, 386 support was removed from mainline kernel.
You should definitely do a write up on how you're getting 8 hours out of a PC-UM10. Didn't they get like 3 hours under Windows? I could use a simple Linux laptop, even if it's terminal only.
We did look at some cheaper options, but it's interesting that the manufacture of electronic systems doesn't really have anything cheap in the space. Properly managing nested BOMs of an arbitrary depth? Pretty much always a high pricetag or something you have to hack yourself...
IE6 just becomes the shell to the webapp instead of a browser in its own right. MS probably even has a way to install multiple versions of IE concurrently so you could run IE6 + "modern IE".
On Windows I think the official way is runnng it in a vm.
Surprisingly, a new one sells for double what I paid for.
I have an emulator on my phone but the tactile response of the keys is awful and the display and keyboard are tiny compared to the "real" thing.
Its just too easy to use. Latency of the calc on my phone is very high compared to a fraction of a second. If my desktop is up and running and logged in and a webbrowser is running (lots of ifs) then google and wolfram alpha are starting to eat into the 48's territory. But it still gets plenty of use. Batteries last about a year.
I also have a 32Sii at the workbench vaguely 90s vintage.
In 1985, I was preparing for the matriculation exam (at end of high school). I was worried that my Sharp EL-506 battery would run out in the middle of this important exam, because it was already 3 years old. However, I did not change it. It lasted the matriculation exam. It lasted also my MSc studies and army, 9 years altogether. And beginning of my working career. And it actually still works, though nowadays I don't need it so it's just at the bottom of the drawer. But it is OK, 31 years after buying it, with original batteries and some significant use during high school and uni. I just don't understand.
TI has a pretty good gig going since they're selling a "calculator" and not a "computer". "Calulators" don't follow the same market dynamics as "computers", so as long as everyone in that market plays along and competes on features (or no one adds features) they should be able to maintain their margins ad infinitum
Knowing you can update or change your system implies nothing or no one is really indispensable. I would much prefer something like that.
"A slow sort of country!" said the Queen. "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!"
- Alice in Wonderland
If it works, it works. The cost to "upgrading" something like this is staggeringly high when you factor in the likelihood that the change is going to break something.
Edit: No, apparently it was switched off in 2010, I remember talking to somebody from their IT department back in 2008 when that computer was functioning, didn't know that they actually shut it down now.
* I know a person still running their entire businesses off an old HP-41 series calculator and an accounting book.
* A company I worked for in 2003 was running their entire DHCP off a 1985 built VAX. It worked and hadn't been rebooted for 15 years.
* Until well into the 00's, most UK rail timetable displays across the UK were running off circa 1985 BBC Micros. The following display was quite a regular occurrence: http://www.ntk.net/2000/07/14/dohtrain.jpg
Just because it's old, doesn't mean it doesn't work and leaving it isn't the most cost effective thing to do.
A couple of years ago my father and I scrapped the last of the Rainbows (not rare enough for a museum to be interested) and a Micro PDP 11/23 (no interest from museums or UK PDP enthusiasts, and too hard to ship internationally). It was a sad day.
[1] http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0679602615
(I still have several boards from a DG computer on my office wall. Geek porn...)
I agree that its a great book, these days it would be much less dramatic with everything running on simulators prior to chip tapeout.
My Mom worked at Data General and she used to take home some transparent masks for chips that were "corporate trash". She made art out of them and they're still hanging in her house.
Same here, pretty much. That was a very influential book for me. I went back and read it again a couple of years ago, and it was still fascinating. Then I found out a guy at our local Hackerspace was there during some of that time and knows some of the folks mentioned in the book. That made it all seem even more real to me... quite an interesting story in any case.
You can also make a nice living writing xBase (dBase/FoxPro/Clipper) code. Millions of lines of xbase still happily running along.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harwell_computer
[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVgc8ksstyg (the video doesn't really do it justice)
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dekatron
There's a button on a long wire which you could click to advance the current program a single step. You could watch the RAM spin and flicker and the relays(?) 'clack' through the computations :-D
It's a great museum because of how massively hands on it is. I can't think of many other places that have that high percentage of exhibits which are there for kids (and adults) to play on.
He kept one in his detached garage that would load the initial bootstrap and then prompt the console for the operating system, which he didn't have. From that point on it patiently waited for a response and was used to heat the garage.
$
But the Operators never arrive.
boot> _
The developers should have put a countdown timer in there. Each hour, add a question mark and change it to:
boot?> _ boot??> _ boot???> _ hello? boot?> _
You probably don't even support IE8 anymore. :)
I find this truly fascinating.
Here's a sample of a great mod: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZWgXiVJbpI - albeit from a lame demo. There are thousands more available at aminet.net.
I've tried replacing the machine with emulation, but there is something comforting in seeing the old girl in the corner serving as well as she ever did. Perhaps devices living beyond their natural lifespans comforts man's worries over his own perishable nature.
They do make great coding music. Not coincidentally, .mods resemble code, being in a way code themselves, with tightly structured and repetitive patterns but also with their own creativity flowing over the top.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dmhtc5S4atU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpNGBzd2SLE
Necros / Isotoxin