12 Nov
1998
12 Nov
'98
2:16 p.m.
Well, I don't know. My school just trashed another
286 system that
they could have given to somebody (we do loan 486s to students in
need). A pretty interesting machine, to boot. It's still in the
bin, but I didn't grab it because of lack of room. I did grab the
5 keyboards they threw away, though. Speaking of my school, it has
some sort of 'modem' made by IBM. It has a brown front, and a 5.25"
floppy drive. Several membrane type buttons on the front, too. Anyone
know what it is? It connects the school attendance system to a server
downtown, and I have yet to find out what that is. Maybe they'll let
me play with it for a while if I ask :) Noone has any idea what model
it is, but everyone says it's really old.
I've seen several of those before, but never worked on them before. The
Arkansas Department of Motor Vehicles must still have hordes of those
things sitting in remote offices with dumb terminals attached. My guess
is that it plugs into something like an AS/400 or UNIX server. It's most
likely mid-80's era.