Place of manufacture for DEC equipment?

jwsmobile jws at jwsss.com
Tue May 5 10:25:43 CDT 2015



On 5/5/2015 7:57 AM, Rod Smallwood wrote:
> Well the other story I know but can't confirm also concerned a fork 
> lift truck
I had an experience @ Microdata in the 70's with a forklift modified 
system.  The opposite was true.  There were two holes the size of the 
forks about even with the 1600 chassis which was mounted in the center 
of the cabinet.  Cabinet was just shy of 6' high.  There was a verical 
mounted reel to reel Microdata drive in the top of the cabinet, and 2 
10mb Marathons (I think RL02 is same) drives in the bottom.

The entire bay and power supply was sheered off, as you could see 
daylight thru the holes.  No boards were useful, and as the forks went 
thru the chassis, most ICs were scraped of leaving just remnants of pins 
on the boards.

The problem with the peripherals was that there was good wiring from the 
peripherals to the controllers in the bay.  As the damage occurred to 
the boards in the bay, in the form of them first all being shoved to one 
side, then finally punched partially out the opposite side of the bay, 
was that we had really good connectors. So the boards in the tape drive, 
and the disk drives were torn so badly that those boards rendered the 
entire system junk.

Only an 8" fan in the top and maybe if you stretched it the breaker box 
in the bottom rear was useful.

That was what the insurance company needed to hear to justify a claim of 
around $100,000 which was what a full Reality went for in the late 70's 
in the heyday.

I had a reputation of trolling scrap bins and building systems in the 
engineering area to play with, but I have to say that one took the cake 
as far as junk.  Not one thing of any use to steal from the cabinet.

The system is one like in this brochure.

http://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/minicomputers/11/367/1984

Jim


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