Hello Friends,

I have enjoyed this thread so much, I just have to jump in with a couple of
my own...

My first 3000 was a Series II in 1977, but that one ran like a top, no war
stories here...

In a previous life, I worked for a Darn Large mag printer... and we picked
up a new contract to print k-5 educational materials which included the
necessity to print bar coded labels to identify the number of teacher and
number of student copies...  The tool of choice was a HP 2680, and we found
a cheep one attached to a s/42 {apparently marketed as a standalone print
station which could be feed with RJE to pull that blue print}...

Now for the war story...

Apparently the back of the S/42 was pushed up against the back {exhaust}
of the 2680.  This became obvious when I opend up the cage in the s/42
and found the only non-black in the card cage was the space between
the cards where I removed the gold {black} book! {toner poisoning}.

Yes, every card in this system was completly black and none of the board
components was identifyable..  But {oop's don't start a sentence with But}
as they say if it ain't broken, don't fix it...  I booted this system up,
guessed the mgr.telesup password and logged on...  We ran this system as
a development system supporting 12-14 programmers for several years until
we could step to to a s/48.

By The Way, this war story in no way suggest that the inside of your
card cage is a good place to store your GOLD/PLATINUM/SILVER/BLACK/? Book!

Enjoy,

James Hofmeister
Hewlett Packard
Worldwide Technology Network Expert Center
P.S. My Ideals are my own, not necessarily my employers.