Eric Messelt's story reminded me of incidence that happened to me about 5
years ago.  I was back East do an operations class to disaster recovery
company who had just purchased a 3000.

There were two interesting items.  The first one I noticed was that they
had two or three (my memory isn't that good) rooms filled with computers -
very impressive.  And over in the corner of one of the rooms was this tiny
HP3000 that was more powerful (more memory and more disk space) than most
of the DECs and IBMs that took up ten times the space as the 3000.

The second more impressive item was the fact that they had a cold spell
that snapped all of the power lines.  When I walked in the place was a mad
house - no lights, no computers, no nothing.  People were walking around
with flashlights trying to figure out what to do.  There was a green glow
coming from the corner of one of the rooms.  Upon closer observation, the
green light was coming from the HP3000 and said "Power Failure".  I
mentioned it seemed like a good time to teach them how to bring the system
down in an orderly manner - which we did.  When power was resumed a few
hours later, the staff didn't have time for the 3000 or me - they were busy
trying to bring up all of the other computers and recover from corrupted
databases, crashed systems, etc.  I walked over to the 3000, turned on the
power and up it came without any problems.  Since they figured it would be
well past midnight before they restored all of the other systems, I left
with a smile on my face and a resolve never to go back to Big Blue or DEC.

Judy

_________________________________________________________________
Judith S. Fisher                          Voice : (310) 820-7191
FDF Computer Consulting Corporation       Fax   : (310) 826-1615
11656 Montana Ave, Suite 102              E-mail: [log in to unmask]
Los Angeles, CA 90049
             FDF is Focusing on Development for the Future
_________________________________________________________________