Most
softies who have tried to work with the internals of the
IBM PC have
discovered that if it doesn't work,
you're screwed. Either nothing
happens at all, or the
motherboard emits one of those hideous
beep
codes. Now unless you happen to have a beep code table handy, there is
no indication as to what went wrong. If the
hardware were a piece of
software that came with
source code, you could just
recompile, but
instead you have to use
trial and error -- take out and reinsert.
Clearly, I can't be the only one who thinks it's insanely difficult to
debug hardware configurations.
I think it is high time that we get rid of this problem once and for
all. If we replace all hardware with emulators, we will no longer have
to worry about loose chips, or dirty connectors. C64, Amiga and Atari
emulators have been with us for years, and I hear that the x86 emulator
is nearing perfection. When that one can run all software without
problems, I think we are ready to remove what must be the biggest
obstacle to computing of all time: hardware.