On 10-Feb-16 00:41, Zachary Kline wrote: > This is around 50% humorous, but it’s still a thing I’ve been thinking about > lately. From a newbie’s perspective, all SIMH machines are very similar. The > worst thing about emulation is that the “feel,” of the original hardware > doesn’t seem to be there. Simh can emulate tons of hardware from different > manufacturers, but none of that will tell me what it was like to actually use > the devices in a physical sense. > As a blind user, I’m doubly interested in this kind of physicality because I > experience the world through touch and sound. I have little conception of the > shape or size of many of these notional machines, and they are all reduced to > various abstractions at a console prompt. It’s hard to imagine a thing I was > far too young to experience. > I was reminded of an Apple II emulator I saw once, sadly not accessible, > which made the appropriate disk drive noises in use. Its kind of useless from > a practical standpoint, but a lot of my interest in these machines isn’t > practical to begin with. I want to explore an earlier kind of computing, but > don’t expect to get a job with it or have anything beyond some entertainment. > I really don’t know what, if anything, can be done to bridge this weird > disconnect. Actual hardware is probably gradually fading out, and in any case > probably wouldn’t be accessible from my perspective anyway. > > Any thoughts? Apologies for the disjointed post, it’s rather late. ;) > It's perfectly reasonable to see with other senses.
One good source is youtube videos. There are a lot of them with audio of computer peripherals. Here are a few: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P91860AuF5M data products line printer printer debug & ope https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rb8LKelTBuw Drum printer. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSEvVxdJNIw Calcomp 565 plotter https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHgpmwIkIgg Spinwriter (Letter quality printer) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnnGbcM-H8c 029 keypunch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2RCgIrZiC6c IBM 083 card sorter https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b48uiLsF19s tour of IBM equipment at CHM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w62NC1R6WLs IBM 1130 reading cards from a 1442 reader/punch. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFMQ1qT_RFM Teletype ASR35 reading paper tape. Google search 'videos' for your choice of hardware and there's a good chance you'll find more. For physical size, nothing beats a museum, where you can also get a feel for texture, relationship of components, and, if you're lucky, interact. If you have a good describer on tap, you can get maybe 20% of that watching the videos with him/her.
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