Allan - now that the Cold War is over and the site closed I guess I can
reveal a secret. I was stationed in a NATO bunker in the FRG 1973-1974 and
the site had a HUGE RCA mainframe - old even then - that was full of tubes.
It seemed at least once a week, more often once every 2-3 days the thing
went down for something - this is the mainframe responsible for tracking
Warsaw Pact aircraft from Poland west...It wasn't dire as there were 2 other
sites - a mini NORAD - around the country.

On that Burroughs we had 2 removable 2MB disks - they weren't "Packs" as
they had but one platter - and the heads would regularly go south - hit the
surface and ruin the disk. It had a teletype for the console. We went though
a lot of paper.

We had a COBOL compiler and it would take the entire night to recompile our
applications.

Bill
----- Original Message -----
From: "Allan Chalmers" <[log in to unmask]>
To: "william brandt" <[log in to unmask]>; <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Monday, July 24, 2000 1:36 PM
Subject: Re: [HP3000-L] HP3000 - reason for the longitivity


>
> --- william brandt <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> >>snipped<<
> > Our first business computer was a Burroughs B700,
> > about 1974. It was pretty
> > crude by today's standards - 40K of core memory - an
> > extra 8K was available
> > for $10,000 - and that's 1974 dollars.
> >
> > The computer  required a service call literally
> > averaging 1x/week in the 5
> > years we had it.
>
> In the pre-cambrian period I was a CE for RCA on their
> 301 and 3301 mainframes.  RCA considered 95% uptime
> normal in a week.  And that was with a CE servicing
> the thing at least weekly, sometimes daily.
>
> Thank you HP for the e3000 :-)
>
>
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