23 May
2012
23 May
'12
5:38 p.m.
The RA81's were notoriously failure prone.? Rumors abounded for the reasons, things
like the glue flaking off (from something) and coating the platters to (my favorite) that
the fire control system in the Colorado plant somehow went nuts and pumped the contents of
the pond into the basement of the factory and got everything contaminated.? This was
especially delicious since the pond was prominently featured in their brochure as a
decorative item and backup water supply.?? This would be around 1984 or so.? The Fugitsu
Eagles were just appearing with great performance and reliability.? Since I was working
for DEC's biggest customer at the time (BP) we got a special visit at our monthly
meeting from a reliability specialist explaining whey the Eagles with their higher part
count and less integration would have worse reliability.? This despite a graph presented
by our Dallas manager showing the incredible failure rates of the RA81's.? They were
replacing a few every week.? (they had dozens of them to hold all that seismic data).?
Those Eagles made a lot of money for Systems Industries who were integrating them into VAX
systems.? After a visit to their offices in Millpitas, California we bought a bunch of
them for our San Francisco data center.? Good times, that.