A little humor based on a .sig

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dmpyron
 
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Joined: Mon Dec 10, 2012 11:14 am

A little humor based on a .sig

Post by dmpyron »

I noticed the .sig for adafruit_support_mike and I remember this from the very old days.

Once upon a time there was this company called Digital Equipment Company, or DEC. Well, they built what was referred to as a midi computer. The greatest of these was the VAX. The VAX 11/780 was built from thousands, no, hundreds of thousands of TTL chips. Things like 74181's. Now, it was the first "affordable" 32 bit computer, way back in 1979. In 1980 I worked for DEC. I did a little work writing VMS (you can find my name in the VMS 2.2 source fiche 8) ) but I was really in software support and consulting. We had a customer that built large memory cards for the VAX. DEC sold 1 MB cards (for about $16,000) but Mircron Technologies had an 8 MB card for only $32,000!!! Well, they bought 8 VAXen, at about a cool million each. Then they bought the VMS source code. "Sorry, we can't support the OS anymore". Then they bought the source for the microcode. "Sorry, we can't support the processor anymore". Then they bought the UNIBUS microcode. "Sorry, we can't support any part of the machine". (The UNIBUS had a write only register called the Failed UNIBUS Address Register :wink: . Write to it and the machine crashed)

Then one day they decided that they had made a mistake :shock: and paid what's known as OTB :wink: consulting rates to make the VAXen work again.

So I guess that they suddenly realized that they didn't want to "truly own" the machines :oops: .

Question: If breaking your iPhone when your try to change the iOS it is called "bricking", what do you call turning 5 foot tall, 3 foot deep and 12 feet long machine that weighs about 2000 pounds?

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adafruit_support_mike
 
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Re: A little humor based on a .sig

Post by adafruit_support_mike »

When I went to Iowa State, my roommate was a sysad for the VAX 11/70 cluster. I have many fond memories of hanging out with him during third shift, swapping tapes, running batch jobs, and throwing paper airplanes over the 4-row, 8' high, 24' long 4 Gigabyte drive array.
dmpyron wrote:Question: If breaking your iPhone when your try to change the iOS it is called "bricking", what do you call turning 5 foot tall, 3 foot deep and 12 feet long machine that weighs about 2000 pounds?
Late-Cretaceous asteroid event. ;-)

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