18 Apr
2002
18 Apr
'02
8:10 p.m.
At 08:00 PM 4/18/02 -0400, you wrote:
I've seen several dozen Tempest Macs, about a dozen Tempest PCs and a smattering of
other Tempest systems and all of them have had the motherboard still in them. Almost none
of them have had the drives still in them but occasionally a drive turns up by itself.
IIRC all of them have removable drives in them including the PCs. The strangest one that
I've seen was a Tempest PS-2. The removeable drive in it was a real kludge.
About a month ago I picked up a Tempest Pentium PC with a bad CPU card that still had
the drive in it. It had a VERY expensive 1553 Bus analyzer card in it and ALL the
(Classified) software was still on the drive. I offloaded 1553 files and wiped and
reformatted the drive.
Joe
These things
are extremely rare in general, at least out in the wild.
This is only the third to surface, and of all three now documented on the
web (or at least known to be) they are all completely different.
Actually, I have a fourth one (IIRC, I got it from a list member) that I
haven't put on Applefritter yet. It's like Sellam's Systematics in
design concept, but is shoddier and has a back like the tempest SE/30.
Curiously, like the SE/30, this tempest Mac is also missing it's
motherboard and back panel. Does anybody know if motherboard removal was
a common practice in decomissioning tempest computers?