Now, this is really off topic. And it's a bit of a long story, so you probably want to just skip this. This is not the thread you're looking for. Move on.
Anyway, a long time ago in a country far far away, the company I was working for inherited the cabinets for the first DEC VAX in Australia. It arrived at Sydney University around 1978 (flaky memory I'm afraid, but it really was the first.) Some years later, it was retired, and the innards were sold for spares, but we took the main CPU cabinet and installed a refrigerator for peoples' lunches and the milk for the espresso machine and stuff like that. We relabeled it "Frigital" instead of "Digital", and over a period of years basically forgot that it was unusual. We had some interesting moments, for example when the CEO of Digital Australia came in for a meeting and we made him a cuppacino and he almost had an unfortunate medical incident. One day the founders came back from a business trip, and it was gone. After a bit of detective work and torture, the story came out. The company's insurance agent had visited, and the office manager made him a cuppa, and he freaked out: "You can't have a refrigerator in a metal cabinet! Your insurance is void! Get rid of it instantly or ...". Whatever he threatened was enough for the manager (who didn't really get the whole historical significance thing) to have it removed and scrapped, and it was too late.
Skip forward about 15 years, I was telling this story to a particularly creative (a.k.a. insane) group of people in my office in Australia, over some nice wine. Rather a lot really. Apparently they were taking notes.
Last year, I returned from a vacation and showed up at work on the day after Christmas, having been out of email contact for about two weeks. I got to the office and saw:
Yes, they had been watching EBay for four years to get this for me. They had to get the facilities people to take the door off my office to get it in!
So, nearly a year later, I'm leaving the company I now work for, and when I told my boss, pretty much his first words (after a short pause) were: "You have to take the VAX with you!" I had every intention of doing so anyway. Best Christmas present ever.
So, tonight, Frigital 2 came home, and (with a bit of work last week to dismember it) became our new wine cabinet. There will be further mods to it over time. Anyone who can convince me that they know what a VAX is(*) (and I know at least some of you can...) can choose a bottle from it to share, if you come here to drink it.
(*)For those of you who don't know what a VAX is, it's like a cellphone but three orders of magnitude different in every metric: volume, power, memory, compute, storage...
(**) That thing in the bottom right is an 8-inch floppy drive, for loading the microcode! Bottom left is a PDP-11/03, that boots the machine.
(***) These footnotes are probably sufficient to qualify for the free offer.
Anyway, a long time ago in a country far far away, the company I was working for inherited the cabinets for the first DEC VAX in Australia. It arrived at Sydney University around 1978 (flaky memory I'm afraid, but it really was the first.) Some years later, it was retired, and the innards were sold for spares, but we took the main CPU cabinet and installed a refrigerator for peoples' lunches and the milk for the espresso machine and stuff like that. We relabeled it "Frigital" instead of "Digital", and over a period of years basically forgot that it was unusual. We had some interesting moments, for example when the CEO of Digital Australia came in for a meeting and we made him a cuppacino and he almost had an unfortunate medical incident. One day the founders came back from a business trip, and it was gone. After a bit of detective work and torture, the story came out. The company's insurance agent had visited, and the office manager made him a cuppa, and he freaked out: "You can't have a refrigerator in a metal cabinet! Your insurance is void! Get rid of it instantly or ...". Whatever he threatened was enough for the manager (who didn't really get the whole historical significance thing) to have it removed and scrapped, and it was too late.
Skip forward about 15 years, I was telling this story to a particularly creative (a.k.a. insane) group of people in my office in Australia, over some nice wine. Rather a lot really. Apparently they were taking notes.
Last year, I returned from a vacation and showed up at work on the day after Christmas, having been out of email contact for about two weeks. I got to the office and saw:
Yes, they had been watching EBay for four years to get this for me. They had to get the facilities people to take the door off my office to get it in!
So, nearly a year later, I'm leaving the company I now work for, and when I told my boss, pretty much his first words (after a short pause) were: "You have to take the VAX with you!" I had every intention of doing so anyway. Best Christmas present ever.
So, tonight, Frigital 2 came home, and (with a bit of work last week to dismember it) became our new wine cabinet. There will be further mods to it over time. Anyone who can convince me that they know what a VAX is(*) (and I know at least some of you can...) can choose a bottle from it to share, if you come here to drink it.
(*)For those of you who don't know what a VAX is, it's like a cellphone but three orders of magnitude different in every metric: volume, power, memory, compute, storage...
(**) That thing in the bottom right is an 8-inch floppy drive, for loading the microcode! Bottom left is a PDP-11/03, that boots the machine.
(***) These footnotes are probably sufficient to qualify for the free offer.
