floppy disks?

[Bob]

** Reply to message from Gene Heskett <gheskett at shentel.net> on Sat, 9 Mar 2019
21:48:44 -0500

<snip>
> 
> CBS had a contract with DEC to maintain them.  The crashes got more 
> frequent eventually to 10+ times a day. Each time the DEC Field people 
> would come and exchange a piece, claiming it was fixed but they 
> eventually replaced everything in it but the frame rail with the serial 
> number stamped on it. Without fixing the crashing which got ever more 
> frequent. When it got to the point we were oweing CBS for the missed 
> commercials, I called Hugo, the computer guy at CBS and told him to find 
> me another machine that didn't crash, the only one he had was his test 
> mule where he could test/fix boards from other stations in it.  So he 
> got in touch with DEC and moved my serial number to New York City and 
> sent me his test mule, registering its serial number as now at WDTV. I 
> kept my hard drive because my bird map vs sky position was different due 
> to a documentation mixup when we poured concrete. But the crashes moved 
> to NYC, the NYC techs couldn't fix it either, and Hugo was then out of a 
> test mule so CBS was forced to re-equip all the affiliates with new 
> industrial IBM's with ARTIC cards in them. They just Worked.

Ah the Artic card.  I had forgotten about them.  I wrote communications
programs for them in the mid 1990s for a small company that was selling turn
key Unix systems.


<snip>

-- 
Robert Blair


No man's life, liberty, or property is safe while the legislature is in session.  -- Mark Twain (1866)