Many Things (daily users of classic computers)

[Mark Tapley]

At 16:05 -0600 1/28/05, news at computercollector.com wrote:
>RE: people who use classic computers as their primary machine, not including
>those of you on the list who work for computer museums -- I'm very curious how
>many of you exist.  And, do you use classic computers by 1.) choice, 2.) lack
>of budget, or 3.) technological need (that is, legacy connectivity)...?

Yo. I have two machines, a laptop G4 and an 040 NeXT Cube. The NeXT 
does Mathematica modelling on an occasional basis, and runs a perl 
script weekly to generate commands to send to the IMAGE spacecraft.
The laptop *could* do both, of course, but: a) The Mathematica code 
was developed on Mathematica 3 and function changes mean it won't run 
on Mathematica 5, current for Mac OS X on the laptop until/unless I 
update it, and b) the perl scripts grab a bunch of files via ftp, so 
it's actually faster to modem into the NeXT and run it there than to 
run in local (grabbing files across the modem) on the laptop when I'm 
on the road.

So I'm mostly in category 1) (choice), but there are some elements of 
3) in there as well. The NeXT was introduced for reason 2), since I 
got Mathematica 3 on it at a pretty good price originally and wanted 
to avoid spending money for a recent edition thereof for the first 
use.
-- 
					- Mark
			210-522-6025, temporary cell 240-375-2995