RT - the rude, the bad, and the ugly

From: Miles O'Neal <meo_at_netads.com>
Date: Sat Jan 9 01:37:23 1999

jpero_at_pop.cgocable.net said...
|
|Is those RT's that bad? is there will be a problem if I tear it
|apart for its parts, the shipping and trying to selling would be a
|problem except no problem shipping parts except for case.

RTs were pretty bad. They were s l o o o o w w w...

And they had the most bastardized version of anything
daring to claim any kinship to UNIX that you can imagine.
The manuals were terrible. I suspect that if you were from
an IBM mainframe world, being forced at gunpoint to consider
PCs and UNIX and such, they were heaven-sent. But to
those of us already working with workstations and micros,
they were the Red Menace that Senator McCarthy warned the
world about - they just happened to be Blue.

|If you're really using the classics and using it as tables or
|something, protect them from spills, bumps etc..

Quick vignettes...

1) I contracted for IBM here in Austin for a while. There
   was an RT on the austin.ibm.com network named "doorstop".
   AFAIK, about all it was being used for was to answer the
   pings for "doorstop".

2) At PSW, Frank King (the IBM upper manager who more or
   less built the IBM workstation division) had just been
   installed as president when we took him on a tour of the
   premises. As we escorted him into the secure lab, his
   eyes lit up as he saw an RT.

   ``An RT! Wonderful! What do you use this for?''

   Tom Stewart pushed it in front of the door to hold it open.
   ``A doorstop? What else?''

3) During the time I was at IBM (14 months) I saw rooms and
   rooms full of RTs. I kinda have to laugh, thinking about
   what they were paying for space. One of the graphics labs
   had about 30 linear feet of wall space, 10 feet high, just
   stacked with the processor boxes, because they were running
   out of other places to put them. I never figured out what
   they were doing with them - whether they couldn't give them
   away, or were afraid to, or what.

If I had one, I would probably protect it. If I had two, I
would protect one. For the other, I would have an auction.
The high bidder would get to step out back onto the rifle range
(why have 5 acre sin Texas without a rifle range?), and put a
7.62mm bullet into the RT's evil, beating heart.

And in Austin, there would be *lots* of bidders. I might not
make $6,818.00, but I'd make enough to pay my ISDN bill for
a while...

-Miles

Nah, I'm sure there are 3rd world countries that would take them.
But after they had them a while, they'd be even more pissed at
the US than they are now... 8^/
Received on Sat Jan 09 1999 - 01:37:23 GMT