12 Dec
2004
12 Dec
'04
12:43 p.m.
Joe R. wrote:
At 12:39 PM 12/12/04 -0500, you wrote:
I got a PDP-11 (well, a pair of them) that had been decommissioned
The thing that astounds me
is that this laptop is probably nearly 16 years old and it is far
cleaner inside than anything I use day to day. It must have been in a
lab or never taken out of its case. The keyboard is shiny new and the
drive area is spotless, still with the colored stickers in place.
Pristine, really.
I was offered a complete HP-150 system last year but had to go get it.
It turns out that is was in the Florida Regional Crime Lab. I went and
picked it up and it was THE cleanest computer that I've ever seen. It
looked like it had just come out of the factory and was spotless inside and
out. Not even any stickers on it. It turns out that it had spent it's life
inside a lab hooked to a gas chromatograph or some such were NO
contamination could be tolerated. It was real shame to bring it home and
stuff it into the outbuilding with all the other computers. Anybody else
run into situations like this? from a med supply warehouse that day. Pristine clean,
inside and out,
and they still had the card-separators on the rear edge of the Qbus
cards. They told me that if Compaq hadn't refused to renew their
maintenance contract, they wouldn't have replaced the machines. I
didn't know about Mentec then, and apparently neither did their field tech.
Doc