🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1990Sep10....@hq.demos.su>, a...@hq.demos.su (Vadim G. Antonov) writes:
> 	The joke about rewinding fans resembles me one real case:
> 	I was mastering Unix-like system for East German ugly
> 	brain-damaged PDP-11 clone (K1630) and have found the
> 	non-DEC trap "FAN FAILURE" !
>
I once heard an interesting story about a Soviet PDP-11 clone. I was talking
to a guy that seems to be kind of a meta field-service engineer with DEC;
in other words, if he can't fix it it doesn't get fixed. He said that the
US State department called one day and dropped off a Soviet clone of the
11/34. They had obtained it from DEC in Italy; a company there had bought
it from some other company and called DEC asking for field service. DEC
showed up and discovered it wasn't theirs, so they thought the State
Department might be interested. I guess not...

> 	Could anybody say me why (practically?) all German machines are
> 	equipped with power switch on a rear panel, so one have to
> 	seek for it for some minutes? ;-)

No, but I did hear a good explanation for why IBM mainframes are so
user-hostile once. It seems that IBM once lost a court case and was ordered
by the court to build its machines such that they could not be used for
criminal activities. The joke is that they succeeded; since the machines
can't be used at all, they can't be used for criminal activities. Any
nice usable user interface would be a violation of court order, so they
can't improve it.

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Roger Ivie

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