On Wed, 5 Nov 2008 20:11:02 UTC, Andy Champ wrote:

That rings a bell. We had such a setup in the machine room at BRA01 to
drive the 2980. It never worked though, and you wouldn't call a 2980
"medium sized" either. One of those little things - I knew it was
there, but never actually saw it, just heard it cursed!

We had one too. In fact, when I last looked we still had it. It was
installed in 1976 to drive a an ICL 2960 installation (ICL insisted we
had it). It was installed in an outbuilding, and just ran...and
ran...and ran. It then ran our VAXcluster ten years later, and if it's
not still there, it hasn't been gone for all that long.

I remember ICL diddled us (mainly incompetence, which was the norm for
them). After six years someone noticed this thing hadn't been serviced,
but ICL had been charging us a large sum over the years for its
maintenance. I think we got the money back and took out a contract with
the manufacturers.

One of the most amazingly reliable pieces of kit I have ever seen. It
ran for six years without stopping, and then for a year at a time
between maintenance checks. It was from Mawdsley, I'm pretty sure.

ICL were the bane of my life for ten years...don't even get me onto the
CPU hardware design flaw they refused to fix, which involved me writing
microcode patches...

--
The information contained in this post is copyright the
poster, and specifically may not be published in, or used by
http://www.diybanter.com