9 Jun
2015
9 Jun
'15
2:58 p.m.
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