institutional amnesia

On Dec 5, 2011, at 4:05 AM, Toby Thain wrote: Some of us remember it profitably. :-) We had a steel mill as a client a year or two ago that needed to move from a Multibus system for which they could no longer easily obtain replacement parts. We went with a cPCI system running a Core2 from National Instruments (I wasn't on this project, but they seemed pretty pleased with it aside from an odd race condition bug in an Ethernet driver which would bring the whole things to a screeching halt, which is a bad thing for a steel mill stand controller). They had some documentation, but we had to reverse engineer some of it as well... it ended up being a very long process, but we produced several physical binders worth of information that we made sure they stashed next to the racks so they didn't get lost. Interestingly enough, our machines were pressed into service before we had completely finished testing them because one of the Multibus machines died in a rather permanent way while we were testing its replacement. It worked, though! - Dave