Heritage / 1 is a project whose need is not easily explained in terms categorical and convincing (in that seems to smoking habit), but the effort to design, build and program a prehistoric computer, designed to perform well tangibly work "useful", demands an explanation!
Indeed, explanations have given as that of "taste past problems" and "honoring a legacy technology," . But if you touch the story with the hands they were would not it be more appropriate to clone a dinosaur of those, as did John Pultorak to replicate the Apollo Guidance Computer in his basement ?
At this point I must confess that my real motivation (underlying), without ceasing to be a technical and cultural nature, is more in my desire to produce a computer that can be understood, contrary to this "black box" on which I write these notes.
remember my first "emotional contact" with the program was in 1982, when he discovered eight-bit microprocessors, including Intel 8085. And my greatest joy that came from just that one could understand! 8085-A microprocessor no longer a "black box", but within the level of abstraction that provides the block diagram, one can work entrusted as in a boat sailing in shallow water. Not so with a PC.
Create a computer "meant" was because the main objective of Heritage / 1, hence the policy of simplicity in design. His ability to "useful work" was another premise, apparently in contradiction with the first hardware as "simple" will hardly bring fruit if is not at the expense of a very complex software.
The truth is that in six months, and even with a half-finished design, I have come to learn with depth on a myriad of topics on which he was just an idea vaguísima. Has been how to get to unknown lands, having given me the task of drawing their maps and, through them, eventually experiencing a tremendous familiarity with the landscape.
In that sense, Heritage / 1 has been, is being "a unique experience. And I think in the apparent vagueness of purpose, lies, paradoxically, their main asset: the culture, the component that does not support any mathematical formulation.
Technology and mathematics, will be cold and boring until acquiring cultural traits, traditions, ethics, aesthetics, everything that allows the designer intimate with your design in human terms, that is, with passion and joy. And so as a folder of drawings, a prototype and an idea -Heritage/1- have come to form a warm body who often live chat ... intimately, and it is this need for "privacy" that it requires simplicity and understandability. A unique experience, "I said only personally but as the technology is all full of traditions, no consensus on what a" design elegant "and what, a" pidgin, even when there are no formulas for the elegance and the macaroni.
Heritage / 1 has its own culture as: a story to tell, a tradition that follow, a criterion in the mirror. You can get to work or not, do it right or wrong, but in either case the criterion for evaluating its success is not in MIPS (million instructions per second) but their contribution to technological tradition which has sought join as an echo from a time when computers are fast, but not romantic.
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