Cleaning up my workshop is always a chore. My wife tells me it's not because of the minimal physical work involved, but because of my unholy attachment to things. Yes, I admit it. I love stuff.
It's hard for me to discard something like a 1983 IBM PC, replete with original keyboard and IBM green monochrome monitor. It resides in a corner of my basement, gathering dust. I'll probably never fire it up again, even though there are some interesting and possibly useful WordStar files on its 10-Mbyte hard disk (if you’re interested in purchasing it, or swapping something for it, drop me an e-mail).
Somehow I can't seem to garner the energy to trash my 8-inch Seagate 186-kbyte single-sided floppy drives either. Ditto for two Z80 CP/M machines, an ancient Weston Industrial Analyzer VOM resplendent in its polished hardwood case, an equally timeworn HP audio voltmeter, a General Radio 1606 impedance bridge, a Gertsch frequency meter, and myriad other electronic treasures of yore.
Some of this stuff is still useful. For example, I occasionally use a cellar workshop 286 machine with MS-DOS for printing OrCAD files. Yes, there’s an OldDosOrcad
group on Yahoo, and there's a workaround published there that would let me print my schematics to my laser printer using the USB printer port under Windows XP, but the sneakernet connection to my 286 box works just fine, thank you (which is why I installed a 3.5-inch floppy on my 2-GHz Windows machine).
Apparently I'm not the only one with a dustbin electronics fixation, though. Did you know that NASA is still interested in buying Intel 8086 processors?
It's been seven years since an
article published in 2002 by the
New York Times described how the Space Agency has a lot of embedded computing equipment and ground-based test gear that uses the venerable device. But, one of my NASA pals tells me the agency is still actively searching for 8086 stockpiles in 2009.
At first glance, that seems pathetic in this day and age of Power PC and Intel super chips. Nonetheless, a 16-bit 8086 is an inherently acceptable microprocessor, and if you have a proven application that runs well, why not keep it going? If you think NASA's 8086 quandary is bizarre, consider that the Hubble space telescope uses a 80836EX, Intel's first x86 machine to sport a 32-bit architecture.
Software development is costly, and if an application has been tested and certified, why write new code? About every third line in a program usually involves a decision instruction, and ten decisions mean 1024 conclusions, each of which has to be confirmed. If 20 decision points are involved, you're looking at 1,048,576 software checks. Hmm. That kind of verification can get costly.
So, my junkpile DOS box may have more than curiosity value after all. Maybe I ought to contact NASA.
