Re: 80386 support

[Alistair Crooks <agc%pkgsrc.org@localhost>]

On Tue, Aug 28, 2012 at 01:06:12AM -0400, Mouse wrote:
> > I can understand why you might want to boot an old Vax into VMS, or even 
> > Ult$
> 
> Probably.  And if power consumed were all that mattered, most of us
> wouldn't be using old VAXen at all.  There are probably almost as many
> reasons to run the things as there are people running them; I don't
> have a complete list of my own reasons, but three of the more prominent
> pieces I'm aware of include emotional attachment to the platform
> (nostalgia, if you will, though that seems to me like an incomplete
> word for the attachments I have to the VAX), a desire to check the code
> I run on a wide variety of hardware, and the fun of surmounting a
> self-imposed challenge.  (As a simple example of how the VAX is useful
> as an instance of variety, I think it's the only hardware platform I
> have that doesn't use IEEE floats.  For some purposes that's a bug, but
> for others it's a feature.)

Interesting - your answer above leads me to pose a question - would
you feel the same nostalgia/attachment/satisfaction using an emulator
for the old hardware?  It would give the same intellectual challenge,
it would check the code in the same manner as you describe above, and
at least address, in some way, the emotional attachment.

We very rarely used to sit in machine rooms beside VAXen or PDP11s, so
I'm trying to get a handle on the attachment to hardware.

Thanks,
Alistair