William Donzelli <william(a)ans.net> writes: Good point. If you want to see something really scary in that regard, open up an HP 9000 series 5xx and look at the CPU boards. Those *really* look like gold, closer to solid than plated. I was looking (mostly for the memory) a bit more intensely a couple of years ago, and found that 2100 parts were also in demand to keep running systems running. Yep. The mini world was kind of wide there for a while. I expect some of those machines really are gone forever. Has anyone here ever heard of a company called Digital Systems Corporation, based somewhere in (I think) the Maryland suburbs of Washington DC in the late 1970s, maybe into the 1980s? I worked on something of theirs once, called a Galaxy/5. Never heard of it or them since. Come to think of it, there could be good reasons for that, and it could be a good thing. Nah...we've got to keep the failures around too -- learning from mistakes is so much better when they're someone else's mistakes. -Frank McConnell