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.