HP's -- slick stuff, high price. Great mechanicals

A great book... but wrong on this one. The hp stuff had one over the edge interconnect cable of less than 10 inches. The DEC 11/40 (45,50,55,70, etc) in the BA11-F cabinet (the worst offender) had about 1/3 to 3/4 of an inch of ribbon cables (thickness) running through the cable trough an often popping off the Berg connector at the top of the Hex, Quad or Dual board (most had no locking ears on the connector. Yup, the backplane is more reliable as over the top connectors, but between board cables (RH11, RH70, Cache, etc) were my biggest pain in the @#$%^ at DEC). The 11/780 was a lot better with the exception of the lousy SBI cables that were failure prone and a bitch to troubleshoot. The only thing worse was the annoying cables on the back of the 11/750 that were not enclosed at all... I remember the failures of an Emulex Pertec 9 track tape controller which had it's data connector to the backpanel work loose on about 4 bits and happily wrote garbage to the tape while the control lines worked merrily along. And the Unix system didn't know the difference for 6 months until a drive died (read after write at the head is NOT data verification folks). DEC made great CPU's, decent busses and I/O boards but LOUSY CABLE layouts (including the 11/730). Bill --- bpechter@shell.monmouth.com|pechter@pechter.dyndns.org Three things never anger: First, the one who runs your DEC, The one who does Field Service and the one who signs your check.