from Cadnetix to IBM....

From: Aaron Christopher Finney <aaron_at_wfi-inc.com>
Date: Mon Apr 6 19:51:11 1998

Well,

The prognosis is not good for the Cadnetix system. I have tracked down a
couple of engineers from the original company (Which was bought by Daisy,
bankrupted, and bought by Intergraph) working at various places and no one
seems to be able to help. The two most common responses are first that I
am some kind of lunatic for wanting to get a proprietary circuit-design
workstation running, and second that any and all technical/engineering
documents for all Cadnetix hardware is compost in a Colorado landfill. One
of the binders that I grabbed with the system was the maintenance record,
and tells a dismal tale of constant board replacements for various
failures (no wonder they went broke), including a description for what is
happening now. The final result that time? After replacing the drives,
replacing all of the boards, and checking all jumpers and cabling,
Cadnetix just shipped out a newer unit to replace it. Oh well. One
interesting note is that this document has some monetary figures on it;
this company was paying over $16K a year to lease a 68020 with 4megs of
ram and 240megs of storage (2 80meg HD's and the 80meg Cipher), circa
1986.

I was told by one legacy dealer that my Pertec-interface Cipher C880 is
worth about $50 to scrap dealers. He then offered me a complete IBM System
36 with drives,tapes,interfaces, etc., that I'm going to pick up this
week. BTW, does anyone have an extra pertec-to-scsi adapter laying
around in the closet? ;)

Aaron
Received on Mon Apr 06 1998 - 19:51:11 BST