HP3000 model 70 in Australia

Re: (Sieler: i before e) The HP 3000/64, /68, and /70 were nice, big machines. My company still has a client running an HP 3000/70 ... they claim they've twice tried to migrate to a newer (PA-RISC based) HP 3000, but that each time the migration "failed" (no one there now remembers anything about the failures :) They're running it with the clock set back 28 years to avoid Y2K problems. The 3000/64 was interesting. IIRC, it could have about 8 MB of RAM (based on both marketing and operating system limitations), but the backplane had enough wires/signals that it could really support something like 128 MB. So, when we created the RAM disk for it (with Kelly Computer Systems), we were able to stick in something like up to seven 16 MB boards for a large (in those days) RAM disk. We were disappointed to see that the /68 and /70 reduced the backplane's ability to talk to memory down to 32 MB ... so we changed our RAM disk to use bank switching. I remember being amused because the engineer who was tasked with making the board design changes was a nice guy named Lim (#1). We got a surprising bump in orders during the buildup to the first Gulf War, because the Navy used a lot of 3000/70s and needed to speed up processing (and they chose to use our RAM disk). Stan #1: LIM = Lotus-Intel-Microsoft, the guys who "invented" bank switching for the IBM PC sometime after it was already on the market from Tall Tree Systems. -- Stan Sieler sieler at allegro.com www.allegro.com/sieler/wanted/index.html