**OT- Back in the day... I built a few DG Eclipse S/140s from the boards up- quite a rush, for a young engineer. I'll never forget the diagnostic message -"PANIC- Rosebud." I called the factory, and they laughed their butts off, too. These micros were for prototype NMR imaging scanners we were building from old CT scanner parts. But I was always partial to to PDP-11 series, and I can say I learned to write minor programs for them in binary from the front switches. Somehow, I ended up being a Vax systems manager- I guess nobody else wanted to do it. Our proudest moment was when a software upgrade suddenly appeared with the "feature" of us having to pay by the user... so we cloned the two OS versions together so we had all the new features, and the old unlimited number of users. We paid for all that software- so we used it.
It was a sad way that DEC went down the tubes. It was sad when DG went down the tubes. Heck, I thought it was sad when Osbourne went toes up.
I wouldn't give a damn if Compaq folded, except now it looks like they are going to take HP down with them. And the only reason I still have fond feelings for HP is from Back In The Days when their test equipment was like a cross between a swiss watch and a b.f. hammer. And come to think of it, their printers always worked longer than my computers they were hooked up to.
Well, I think this is good for IBM. If the space is good enough that people want to try to enter it, then the big boy is where I'm happy to be.
I'm not that old, but as I think back on it, I might be getting there.
W'D |
