In the context of the previous discussion - which was about gleaning any values from, or interests today in, vintage computing - my strategy is to say that personal computing and minicomputing of the 1970's and into the 1980's was a *resource poor* environment. "Efficiency" in using scarce resources is a necessity, to get something done. As gains were made in memory, processor complexity, speed and storage capacity, these resources were fairly quickly maxed out - and then improved again, and again. Some of this stuff was crude, some of it was well crafted in the McGuire sense. But at some point - certainly over a decade ago, probably more - computing for most purposes, for most people, provided more than enough resources. Processor speed topped off (any faster and they'd cook). Memory was cheap. Storage was cheap. Even the Internet became cheap and common. There's powerful languages and environments for various domains. What became expensive? *People.* Programmer time, engineering time, production time. Craft is not cheap. Even time itself has become an expense. I call the 21st century a "resource rich* period of "computing" - it's odd to talk about computing now, it's like telling fish about water, it's just part of living. My point - It's hard to conserve when there's an (apparent) abundance. Resource-poor and people-cheap, to resource-rich but people-expensive. Bringing it back to vintage computing..... So one value of preserving vintage computing, is to remind us by example and fact, about the issues of "efficiency", from a time when we had no choice but to be efficient. the tools and methods from then, can be applied in principle now. Why bother? - for the reasons that Jonathan noted, there are times and situations where convenient in-efficiency bites us in the ass. Or as Dave McGuire noted, as a matter of quality. Current resources can be overtaxed when mis-used. Old-school methods and quick fixes don't work well when scaled too large. Smart tools used by the less-informed produce un-scalable results. And so on. Resource-poor to resource-rich; and now to maxed-out or inefficient. That's the argument. So we in vintage computing may be able to offer some perspective in how to solve problems of excessive, at least inefficient, use of resources. Or not....smarter software may be smarter than the programmers, and avoid the worst of these problems. Compared to the 1970's, we have computers now to program computers, they do it better than the worst engineers and programmers. This is annoying to us, who take pride in being smarter and more efficient. Also: old stuff is clunky, boring to many. Those are the counter-arguments. Herb Johnson -- Herbert R. Johnson, New Jersey USA http://www.retrotechnology.com OR .net