10 Year Rule

[Tony Duell]

> 
> If you must have an easy-to-state rule, I'd much prefer the form given
> upthread that was something like "anything well outside the current
> computing mainstream".  Even that, though, seems to me to err enough
> (in both directions) to be problematic.

I think that's completely unworkable.

In the next room I have a machine. It has a GUI, a mouse, bitmapped 
display, networking, and so on. Sounds like something close to the modern 
mainstram, yes? Well, I think it's a classic computer by any reasonable 
standard. Or do people object to PERQs now ;-).

Most modern computers have winchester hard disks. Does that mean that 
discussions of the SA4000 series are now off-topic?

Most machines discusser here (and most machines that I own [1]) have a 
von Neuman architecture. So do most modern machines. Does that make 
almost all of what we talk about off-topic?

[1] The main exceptions being calculators like my trusty HP41, which have 
separate program and data storage spaces, with separate connections back 
to the CPU. You can argue that's not a computer if you like, but a 
machine with alphanumeric I/O, a disk drive, RS232 port, HPIB port, that 
is user-progammable, and which I've been known to program in machine code 
[2] sure sounds like a computer to me. And yes, it's way over 10 years old.

[2] Because of the separate program and data areas (user language 
programs count as data, to be interpreted by the machine code progam in 
ROM), doing this is a pain. You need a special RAM box, normally called 
an MLDL (machine language development lab) which appears as ROM to the 
HP41's processor, but which can be loaded as data RAM. 

-tony