[Info-vax] SWAP or Purchase - DS15 for a Microvax 3100-98??? Anyone?

[abrsvc]

On Saturday, March 23, 2019 at 9:53:58 AM UTC-4, johnwa... at yahoo.co.uk wrote:
> On Friday, 22 March 2019 19:11:32 UTC, David, Island Computers  wrote:
> > Must be a model 98 in the US
> > Customer is a defense contractor and says they cannot accept non-US 
> > sourced systems...  Go figure. These were all built in scotland IIRC
> > 
> > David Turner
> 
> The country of origin on many DEC boxes was encoded in the serial number.
> 
> AY => AYR, Scotland.
> 
> Various sites have various magic decoder rings and similar, e.g.
> as referenced in
> http://comp.os.vms.narkive.com/yowxDDoU/dec-serial-number-date-of-manufacture
> (hat tip to Hans Vlems, Paul Sture, and various others for those).
> 
> Paul Sture's website now 404s but the site/facility codes are still listed at 
> http://vaxhaven.com/DEC_Facility_Codes

Interesting side note:  The US state department required paperwork for every system that was shipped complete from Scotland initially since the Alpha at the time was categorized as a "super-computer".  To get around this, the systems were built and shipped without the motherboard and "assembled" in the US.  Note: this was before the Alpha was announced to the world as "available".  Good times...