5 Jun
2010
5 Jun
'10
5:21 a.m.
On 05/06/2010 04:42, Chuck Guzis wrote:
DRAM in the 80's was a scarce commodity in the US,
when the
government imposed anti-dumping penalties on the big Asian makers.
It was pretty ugly; there were even some break-ins in Silicon Valley
for the sole purpose of stealing DRAM.
I have an SGI Indy that was free thanks to that. It must have been
about 15 years ago, when they were fairly new, and our department bought
a whole lot for a new lab. Each was laid out with the top off to take
out the disks for cloning. They must have been spotted for there was a
breakin, and the RAM taken, not without some significant damage to most
of the machines. The insurance company took away the damaged machines
but missed one, and when it turned up later, I acquired it. Amusingly,
when I tried to get a license for something on it a few years later, SGI
claimed that serial number didn't exist.
--
Pete Peter Turnbull
Network Manager
University of York