[Info-vax] [Attn: HP Employees] PDP-11 OS hobbyist licensing

[Paul Sture]

In article <l2ihau$fod$1 at speranza.aioe.org>,
 glen herrmannsfeldt <gah at ugcs.caltech.edu> wrote:

> AEF <spamsink2001 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> 
> (snip)
> > This reminds me of when I was in graduate school in physics. 
> > We had 4 tape drives hooked up to our VAX 11/750. Three of them 
> > were not-so-great Kennedy-brand drives, and one was a TU78 
> > (or TU77). The TU78 (or TU77) worked virtually flawlessly. 
> > It was really, really loud, though. But our part physicist part 
> > sysmgr told us not to use it except if the other 3 were busy. 
> > This is because it wasn't really ours. It was a loaner to make 
> > up for something Digital couldn't deliver on time. 
>  
> > Then it was time for them to pick it up. They didn't pick it up. 
> > We had it all ready to go, called them several times and they 
> > just never came by to pick up the thing. I don't remember how 
> > long that went on. Weeks, maybe months. So we kept it. In fact, 
> > it was _their_ field person who suggested they let him hook 
> > it back up to the VAX! 
>  
> > Years went by and they still didn't want the thing. 
> > It was still there and still working great when I graduated 
> > in 1991.
> 
> Reminds me of a story from many years ago. A (non-academic) lab
> had done some research on a government contract that included
> buying a vacuum pump. When the contract ended, all the equipment
> bought belonged to the government, though they didn't pick it
> up right away. 
> 
> Some time later, the vacuum pump that was sitting around unclaimed
> got used in another system, where it was deeply buried and not
> easy to get out. Sometime later, they came to reclaim the pump.
> 
> In the case of companies, they might be able to write off
> something after enough depreciation. There might be little
> reason to want it back. That isn't true for government contracts,
> though. No matter how worthless it seems, they can still reclaim it.
> 
> (I heard the story some years after it happened. I believe that they
> just bought another pump and sent that one in, but I am not
> completely sure about that.)

Conversely I came across a government computer system that was kept 
running even though it wasn't up to the job it had been bought for. It 
wasn't just about saving face, this was on the books as an IT asset so 
had to incur staff costs and be maintained as well, even though it 
wasn't running anything useful.

-- 
Paul Sture

IBM's Thomas J. Watson predicted a "world market for maybe five computers".
Given the way this whole Cloud thing is going, he might have been extremely
prescient.