RT - the rude, the bad, and the ugly

jpero(a)pop.cgocable.net said... | |Is those RT's that bad? is there will be a problem if I tear it |apart for its parts, the shipping and trying to selling would be a |problem except no problem shipping parts except for case. RTs were pretty bad. They were s l o o o o w w w... And they had the most bastardized version of anything daring to claim any kinship to UNIX that you can imagine. The manuals were terrible. I suspect that if you were from an IBM mainframe world, being forced at gunpoint to consider PCs and UNIX and such, they were heaven-sent. But to those of us already working with workstations and micros, they were the Red Menace that Senator McCarthy warned the world about - they just happened to be Blue. |If you're really using the classics and using it as tables or |something, protect them from spills, bumps etc.. Quick vignettes... 1) I contracted for IBM here in Austin for a while. There was an RT on the austin.ibm.com network named "doorstop". AFAIK, about all it was being used for was to answer the pings for "doorstop". 2) At PSW, Frank King (the IBM upper manager who more or less built the IBM workstation division) had just been installed as president when we took him on a tour of the premises. As we escorted him into the secure lab, his eyes lit up as he saw an RT. ``An RT! Wonderful! What do you use this for?'' Tom Stewart pushed it in front of the door to hold it open. ``A doorstop? What else?'' 3) During the time I was at IBM (14 months) I saw rooms and rooms full of RTs. I kinda have to laugh, thinking about what they were paying for space. One of the graphics labs had about 30 linear feet of wall space, 10 feet high, just stacked with the processor boxes, because they were running out of other places to put them. I never figured out what they were doing with them - whether they couldn't give them away, or were afraid to, or what. If I had one, I would probably protect it. If I had two, I would protect one. For the other, I would have an auction. The high bidder would get to step out back onto the rifle range (why have 5 acre sin Texas without a rifle range?), and put a 7.62mm bullet into the RT's evil, beating heart. And in Austin, there would be *lots* of bidders. I might not make $6,818.00, but I'd make enough to pay my ISDN bill for a while... -Miles Nah, I'm sure there are 3rd world countries that would take them. But after they had them a while, they'd be even more pissed at the US than they are now... 8^/