🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <10...@ucsd.Edu> g...@ucsd.edu (Gerard K. Newman) writes:
:In article <13...@milton.acs.washington.edu> fet...@milton.acs.washington.edu (David Fetrow) writes:
:>
:> This bunch can get fairly militant over their machines (they do some
:>interesting T-shirts some years commenting on DECs 'mistakes'.....like
:>the VAX).
:>
:
:Sure thing -- classic T shirts include slogans like "If your computer doesn't
:have 36 bits then you're not playing with a full DEC" remain popular.

I heard that there was (is?) an Australian vacuum cleaner company called
"Vax" and that they had an advertising slogan that went, "Nothing sucks
like a Vax."  Full page ads from Aussie magazines were popular items in
certain parts of Colorado Springs and Marlboro, so my source informs me.

Around this time, in a Tops-20 Monitor Internals class at DEC's Bedford (?)
training facility, somebody patched the running monitor on the class system
so that its logon banner was the same as the Australian vaccum cleaner
company's slogan.  Things got pretty exciting when one of the instructors
came through the terminal room showing around some bigwig customer types.

He pointed to some terminals, explaining that they were connected to a Vax.
Then he sauntered up to a terminal and said, "These terminals over here are
connected to a PDP-10 running Tops-20."  And then he hit control-C to get
the monitor's attention.  Since there was no job logged in on that
terminal, the logon banner appeared...

I love Tops-20.

-- 
John Wilkes

wil...@mips.com   -OR-   {ames, decwrl, pyramid}!mips!wilkes