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Pastimes : Don't Ask Rambi -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Michael Sphar who wrote (19450)	3/16/1999 7:23:00 PM
From: JF Quinnelly	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71178

I need a 'puter like that one.

To: Michael Sphar who wrote (19450)	3/16/1999 7:40:00 PM
From: Michael Sphar	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71178

The classic Vax 11/780. I cut my VMS teeth on that puppy. I built one out at Intel, I retired two at Sierra. I upgraded disk and memory in 6 of those behemoths at LSI. I finally resolved the mystery crasher called FCAM2 at the LSI Fremont plant after months of troubleshooting random crashes. Previous sys manager swore it was caused by floating grounds. We finally found a one inch strand of gold wire-wrap wire kind of floating loose in the pins of the backplane. Thereafter the system ran flawlessly. A sweet victory even today. I raise my glass to venerate the passing of an age when a VUP was a worthy unit of measure and system managers were measured by how much iron they could push across the floor. It was a grand old puter! With less processing power than a modest PC of today's vintage. I'm getting misty-eyed just thinking about its blowers and datapath cards. Not to mention that ever mysterious internal LSI-11 processor with its eight inch floppy containing that most important of files DEFBOO.CMD. (The default boot file which told the system where the system disk would be found). Kinda like a crank start Model A (for the old car buffs).