I can remember visiting two plants when they were in full production
Westfield MA: made LA-36's (30cps printing terminal) .
They were tested in large rooms.
A flag on short tube was attached to the carriage and all of the
terminals driven from the same source.
If a carriage stopped moving you could see it clearly. It ment a failure
or out of paper.
A golf cart carrying paper, replacement boards and printing units drove
around fixing failures and supplying paper.
Galway: was a systems FA and T plant All of the parts came in on
chartered cargo planes
then they were assembed to suit the customers order.
The vast majority of the staff were hired and trained locally. They were
pretty good too.
However once they managed to get a quad board into a system with two
sets of fingers in one backplane row
and two in the next row down.
Rod Smallwood
On 04/05/2015 18:29, Jason T wrote:
On Fri, May 1, 2015 at 7:00 PM, Don North <north at
alum.mit.edu> wrote:
Many of the PDP-11s in the 70s/80s were built in
the DEC plants in Puerto Rico (Aguadilla
and San German). DEC ran their own charter aircraft between Worcester and Puerto Rico
As a fun aside, one of the PR plants, as well a PDP-8e and some board
assembly, has a brief cameo in the Mystery Science Theater 3000 short
"Progress Island USA." I've cued up the scene at the time marker
here:
https://youtu.be/ZlyaVk8PKwQ?t=532
Although I've seen that short a dozen times, it was only just now that
I noticed the Perkin-Elmer building, too.
Don - what was the deal with the UFO parked out front?
-j