Secret Mac

From: Joe <rigdonj_at_cfl.rr.com>
Date: Thu Apr 18 20:10:31 2002

At 08:00 PM 4/18/02 -0400, you wrote:
>>These things are extremely rare in general, at least out in the wild.
>>This is only the third to surface, and of all three now documented on the
>>web (or at least known to be) they are all completely different.
>
>Actually, I have a fourth one (IIRC, I got it from a list member) that I
>haven't put on Applefritter yet. It's like Sellam's Systematics in
>design concept, but is shoddier and has a back like the tempest SE/30.
>Curiously, like the SE/30, this tempest Mac is also missing it's
>motherboard and back panel. Does anybody know if motherboard removal was
>a common practice in decomissioning tempest computers?

   I've seen several dozen Tempest Macs, about a dozen Tempest PCs and a smattering of other Tempest systems and all of them have had the motherboard still in them. Almost none of them have had the drives still in them but occasionally a drive turns up by itself. IIRC all of them have removable drives in them including the PCs. The strangest one that I've seen was a Tempest PS-2. The removeable drive in it was a real kludge.

   About a month ago I picked up a Tempest Pentium PC with a bad CPU card that still had the drive in it. It had a VERY expensive 1553 Bus analyzer card in it and ALL the (Classified) software was still on the drive. I offloaded 1553 files and wiped and reformatted the drive.

   Joe
Received on Thu Apr 18 2002 - 20:10:31 BST