🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <2^F'...@rpi.edu> ta...@cs.rpi.edu (David C Lawrence) writes:
>In <1989Dec28.0...@polyslo.CalPoly.EDU> api...@polyslo.CalPoly.EDU
>(Pin...@Spikes.slo.ca.EDU) writes:
>> The way I heard it was that it was on public display from the front
>> reception area by way of a huge window.  Upper management didn't
>> think it looked high tech enough, so they said to make some more
>> blinking lights.
>
>This story, true or not, is about an IBM 3090 not a Connection
>Machine.  I am very much reminding myself of that game "Telephone"
>now, but I believe I first saw the story reported as a true one in
>rec.humor.funny (someone could check Brad's anthology and find out
>...) and that there were in fact 6 3090s involved at a mega-travel
>agency in Flordia.  [ Pah!  RPI gets _one_.  They took six. ]  Seems
>as though the agency had set up this nifty new machine room behind
>their main desk in their main lobby with a large window looking into
>it.  Management expected customers to be impressed with the awesome
>computers which they had purchased and were exceedingly disappointed
>when they took delivery of some rather large and dull looking boxes.
>Whining to IBM about this, Big Blue wired up some dummy light panels
>to flash merrily for the people who would view the machines through
>the window.
>
>Then again, maybe I just dreamed this.

No, you did not.  However, it was not quite like that.  IBM was involved.
They were asked to supply some computers for the set of a movie/show
(It was a movie, then it became a TV show...  $6 Milion Dollar Man...)

Anyway, the director saw the computer and asked why there were only a
few lights.  The IBM guy said that that was all they had.  The director
said that the viewers would not recognize it as a computer without
lights and said to bring it back.  The IBM person, wanting to get the
machine into the movie, had an engineer build up a pannel of lights and
a program that would flicker the lights in some way tied to the keyboard
or tape drive or something (I don't know all of the details)  They
bolted this onto the front of the cabinet and the director was happy.

Much the same was true in WarGames when the CRAY and VAX machines they took
pictures of were so "blank" they built this machine with many lights as
the machine that did all of the work.

>
>Dave
>-- 
>   (setq mail '("ta...@cs.rpi.edu" "ta...@ai.mit.edu" "tale@rpitsmts.bitnet"))

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