Front Panel Update

tony duell ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk
Tue Jun 9 16:58:14 CDT 2015


> WTF? Varian was a competitor of DEC. They made minis themselves. Sounds
> extremely strange that one would take a DEC mini, and put a Varian badge
> on it. Did someone try to make a joke?

I will always think of Varian as a maker of (very high quality) vacuum equipment.

I am sure this was not a joke. It wasn't just the name, the switch handles were all green, the silkscreening
was different, etc. It was a normal PDP8/e inside, though. It was part of a piece of lab equipment (I forget
what) and I had to do a minor repair on the PDP8/e side (this was over 20 years ago...). I was pleased to
see that apart from a custom interface board, the rest of it was standard DEC boards, so the printsets I 
had applied.

Incidentally, for those who like HP handhelds, the original HP41C manual has a photo on the title
page of each chapter. One of them clearly shows _Tektronix_ instruments (!)

-tony


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