🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <9...@front.se> p...@front.se (Per Lindberg) writes:
>
>Yup. I nearly got a heart attack when the sales guy said "and then you
>can do THIS", and dropped the HP-25 to the floor, took it up, and
>continued the demo.  Since this was here in Stockholm, Sweden, I
>assume that stunt was part of some standard demo song-and-dance that
>HP programmed their salespersons with :-)

Their peripherals are *darn* tough, too. A previous employer had
several outlying research stations up in the boondocks of eastern
Oregon and Washington that measured various wildlife behavior
patterns and other stuff and recorded the information on a HP 150
with a dual 3.5" floppy unit and some assorted interface gear.
Apparently, one of the stations was in the path of a large forest
fire and had to be moved quickly to another location.

Of course, everyone was running around stuffing things into Jeeps
and not really paying attention to securing any of the equipment
against vibration or anything. After packing up, they researchers
set off for the new site at around 35 or 40 miles per hour. After
bouncing over a particularly large pothole, the disk unit for the
HP 150 bounced out of the Jeep and hit the road -- at about 35
MPH. 

They figured it to be broken for certain, and brought it in to be
fixed. It looked *awful* -- big dents in the top and the
faceplace was broken in several places. We plugged it into a
spare HP 150, flipped it on -- worked like a dream. Amazed the
living daylights out of us. We beat the dents out of the case and
put on a new faceplate and sent it back out to the field.

*Damn* fine equipment.

>I have the impression that the more limited, and weird, the computer
>gets, the more fun it is to program. Really gives you a challenge!

It's the unofficial HP motto: "Who cares if it's like the other guy? Let's
                    make it do something really *neat*!"


>Per Lindberg (The Mad Programmer)  !      __!__



-- 
David Boyes       Disclaimer: Rice University couldn't find an opinion
dbo...@rice.edu      with both hands, a map, a compass, and an escort
                     squad of US Marines. This isn't the one
		     they're looking for either.