My consulting company was in Redwood City, CA. Our nextdoor neighbor had a company leasing new cars. They ran the company on a Burroughs L9000. About August of 2000, they were at the point where they could no longer obtain ledger cards (roughly 8x11 with a magnetic stripe down the side for computer data), for the L9000, so they were going to move to a PC-based system. The owner knew I was a computer collector, so he offered to give me the L9000. I was tempted...but it was a large machine, so I arranged for it to be given to the Computer History Museum (where I was, or became (timeline hazy) a senior docent). I remember the owner saying that only the cleverness of their independent maintenance guy had kept the machine running ... to the point where he'd machined some replacement parts himself. I talked to the elderly lady who ran the machine (i.e., did the data entry). She compared it to the PC, and lamented the loss of the L9000. The L9000 was so much faster and easier to use! She could probably enter data four or five times faster on the L9000. It wasn't just a matter of familiarity ... much of the slowdown was due to the GUI nature of the PC program they switched to, and they no longer had the luxury of having relatively purpose-related hardware on the L9000. Stan

much of the slowdown was due to the GUI nature of the PC program they switched to, and they no longer had the luxury of having relatively purpose-related hardware on the L9000.