General Computer Thread

[Marc]

If it isn't really critical then indeed you can use the old drive.
I don't use external drives as a backup device, they're a transfer device, for backups I use other computers.. had one external drive fail a few years ago, pulled the drive out which was still okay, it now is the internal drive of a frankenmachine.

I had the money I'd use LTO for backup but that's not option at the moment (LTO 5 is affordable on the second hand market, 6 more so as the 7 and 8 drives take over).

Gather than nice thing with LTO5 and later is the ability to use treat the drive as just another file system making it much easier to access.

Though even in professional environment externals are used as backup devices but usually a number of them that then get rotated.

I had an external WD that crap it's self but turned out to the USB to SATA fritzing it's self.

Not sure if that drive is one of my WD 2TBs (either the one that crapped it's self or the one in my desktop)..

 

[Santaman]

Yeah that actually happens quite often, the drive itself being okay but the enclosure having a burnt out controller/USB-SATA/power component, I think over the years I've seen it at least a dozen times.

 

[Marc]

Yeah that actually happens quite often, the drive itself being okay but the enclosure having a burnt out controller/USB-SATA/power component, I think over the years I've seen it at least a dozen times.

only problem is now they've made it hard to shuck the drives because sometimes they lack the SATA connectors, others you need to tape on of the pins.

And the the big mystery - why can you find external drives selling cheaper than the bare internal drives that can be found inside?

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

Lots of people buy external enclosures for that very reason, then rip the drives out and put them as internal drives. I'd love to know why they are cheaper then a standard internal drive too when it's exactly the same thing only in a box.

 

[Guy Gardener]

Lots of people buy external enclosures for that very reason, then rip the drives out and put them as internal drives. I'd love to know why they are cheaper then a standard internal drive too when it's exactly the same thing only in a box.

Volume.

The more of something you sell, the cheaper you can make it, and the more discount you have to give the retailer, and those savings pass on to the consumer.

You have one computer with one hard drive which you have to replace for reasons every 5 to ten years, and if it's been ten years, you might as well replace the entire computer.

Meanwhile some one with a "problem" can wind up buying 3 or 4 external hard drives a year, even if there is nothing wrong with their main computer.

A friend has been yelling at me for years that everything is on line and everything will always be online forever, so there's no need to buy so many external hard drives, when you can just stream.

I have a problem.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

Volume.

The more of something you sell, the cheaper you can make it, and the more discount you have to give the retailer, and those savings pass on to the consumer.

You have one computer with one hard drive which you have to replace for reasons every 5 to ten years, and if it's been ten years, you might as well replace the entire computer.

Meanwhile some one with a "problem" can wind up buying 3 or 4 external hard drives a year, even if there is nothing wrong with their main computer.

A friend has been yelling at me for years that everything is on line and everything will always be online forever, so there's no need to buy so many external hard drives, when you can just stream.

I have a problem.

Thank you. Oh and don't listen to your friend.....

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

A friend has been yelling at me for years that everything is on line and everything will always be online forever, so there's no need to buy so many external hard drives, when you can just stream.

I have a problem.

I'm sorry, but not sorry; your friend is an ignorant arse who doesn't know what he's talking about.

 

[Santaman]

Some stuff has disappeared, or is REALLY hard to find, like the BIOS of old mainboards, drivers for soundcards of which the manufacturer no longer exists etc.
And yes, when you buy in bulk you get a discount, I've worked for a larger computer firm and they paid peanuts for motherboards, memory, harddrives etc because for example they would buy 250-500 harddrives in one go, same with mainboards, CPU's and memory even by the thousands in one go.

 

[Owain Taggart]

^ Would be really great as a historical perspective and also one of preservation, to have a site where a whole bunch of older computers are emulated.

 

[Santaman]

^^ You can emulate quite a few old machines and I think there should be sites around the net which do (or did) it, but these mostly are old mini computers like the DEC PDP series and there are some museums around that run these kinds of machines for real.

 

[Marc]

^^ You can emulate quite a few old machines and I think there should be sites around the net which do (or did) it, but these mostly are old mini computers like the DEC PDP series and there are some museums around that run these kinds of machines for real.

A common one seems to people building kits based on Raspeberry Pi units to emulate a PDP/11 (one of the real things was still in the a University's vax cluster when I was there in the early 90s which sometimes got use when the 8650 was bog down with 1st year students doing Cobol programming).

Then we bogged down a Sun server with C programming through X-terms.

Read at one point how the School of Computer Science paid $AU125,000 for a pair of 125Mhz Ross Hyperspacs to upgrade it. They got back a chunk of the money by selling the old processors.

 

[Owain Taggart]

^^ You can emulate quite a few old machines and I think there should be sites around the net which do (or did) it, but these mostly are old mini computers like the DEC PDP series and there are some museums around that run these kinds of machines for real.

Oh, I know about some sites, as I think I've come across some over the years. But to have something all in one place, as a sort of digital interactive museum would be great. And not just as a data dump, but something that would also give a historical perspective and story about the computer in question.

Speaking of which, has anyone watched The Billion Dollar Code on Netflix? It's a german production about a small innovative team that came up with the concept for Google Earth about a decade earlier than Google did.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

A lot of stuff for Raspberry Pi in terms of old school game emulation like the NES and early playstation, that kind of thing. I have one but hardly touched it, did have a linux on it but didn't get much enjoyment out of it.

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

Emulation is all well & good, but it's not quite like having the original hardware and being able to use said hardware.

 

[Owain Taggart]

That goes without saying, but sometimes access to the original hardware isn't available. Or sometimes, even if the original hardware is present, ie a museum, won't let anyone touch it, let alone use it. This is where emulation would help give a context in terms of interaction. For the best results, I think it should emulate as much of the experience as possible, including any of the peculiarities such as how slow it was. Modern hardware emulation doesn't always take that into account.

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

That goes without saying, but sometimes access to the original hardware isn't available. Or sometimes, even if the original hardware is present, ie a museum, won't let anyone touch it, let alone use it. This is where emulation would help give a context in terms of interaction. For the best results, I think it should emulate as much of the experience as possible, including any of the peculiarities such as how slow it was. Modern hardware emulation doesn't always take that into account.

That's why FPGA emulation is becoming popular. Check out the MiSTer FPGA project.

The next step after FPGA is to recreate the old circuitry, using modern SoC (System on Chip) techniques and to sell new models of old consoles. The hard part is finding companies willing to pony up the $$$ to do it.

There is ALOT we can do by integrating what used to take the space of a MotherBoard, down to the size of a Postage Stamp or smaller using modern SoC design.

 

[Owain Taggart]

I guess that makes me wonder if they could print circuit boards for some of the older computers where access to parts is problematic.

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

I guess that makes me wonder if they could print circuit boards for some of the older computers where access to parts is problematic.

Let's take the NES MotherBoard as an example.

The new MoBo would be completely brand new, everything you see there, would be condensed down to a single SoC (System on a Chip).

There would only be a few traces on the MoBo that all would connect to the SoC.
- The SoC
- The Cartridge slot
- The Controller Ports
- The Power/Reset buttons
- The External Power Plug
- The Video Display out.

Everything else would literally fit on the SoC in < 1 cm² area die using a fairly old process node like Global Foundry 12 nm

 

[Marc]

- The Video Display out.

Though depending on how retro you wanted to be that could also be greatly simplified. Change the video to HDMI which can also carry the audio and you'd negate most of that daughterboard.

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

Though depending on how retro you wanted to be that could also be greatly simplified. Change the video to HDMI which can also carry the audio and you'd negate most of that daughterboard.

I was thinking either HDMI / DisplayPort / SCART

SCART is starting to take off for retro console collections and it offers pure digital RGB & audio feeds despite being a old European standard

Some folks are modding their classic consoles to RGB SCART to get those extra crispy pixel perfect display outputs.