[Simh] PDP-wiki

[Mark Benson]

On 9 Jul 2012, at 15:44, Johnny Billquist <bqt at softjar.se> wrote:

> <rant on>
> Everybody wants to put up cool sites with information, but everybody expects someone else to actually contribute the content...
> <rant off>

It's what I'm good at, I even get paid to do it! ;)

> Sorry, not personally against you Mark.

Absolutely no offense taken, I kind of agree. That's why I spent a bit
of time on DECtec trying to make it look the part and feel like it was
intended for DEC enthusiasts.

> It's just that I think there are too many of the "I've set up a site, please someone else fill it with all the good stuff that everybody wants to see".
> I personally don't see a great need in such sites, and I seldom, if ever, contribute to them. The contents is the hard part. Setting up a wiki or similar itself is the easy thing.

While setting up Wordpress and Mediawiki doesn't take much, I went to
a lot of effort to go the 'extra mile' with DECtec's wiki, far more
than the usual 'change default logo' that most people do.

Also you forget with all these places *someone* has to pay the bills.
In my case I went to an effort to select the domain and setup the site
and I pay (admittedly not much) for the hosting.

> That said, all the power to you all. In case one of you actually manage to create a site where all the useful information does exist, it would be a very nice resource to have.

See my problem is my knowledge is cert slim on most DEC topics so I
figured I'd try to engage the community in dialog and information
sharing instead... but I'm not very good at bouying people up to do
it.

As someone who is learning (from some great people) all about this
little corner if the computing world I find the information really
widely dispersed, hard to pinpoint, sometimes difficult to decipher
and occasionally the knowledge, especially of old machines, is locked
in the head of someone and just isn't out there anywhere.

A community effort to centralise the information would be very helpful
and make introducing new enthusiasts to the community (another thing I
found hard work to start with) a good deal easier.

> (If nothing else, I'll eventually create something running under RSX, just to test the concept, and I like hacking in RSX, and it would also be poetical justice for a PDP-11 to host the information... :-) However, it might just not get any information either... :-) )

I explored the possibility of using Notes or WASD under VMS in a
similar way but eventually concluded self-hosting it for me is a no-go
because I have such abysmal internet and I haven't got a DS10L up my
sleeve I could co-locate nor could I afford to do for just one site.

-- 
Mark Benson

http://markbenson.org/blog
http://twitter.com/MDBenson