Giggle. There was another one.
At the time, I was working for Amdahl UK and IBM was working up to the 3090 announcements. It was 5 or 6 September, 1990. We ran the thing inside Amdahl as "Project 480". Amdahl had a special local group in the UK called the "NSEs" - National Systems Engineers. Secret squirrels. We were preparing our response to the (as yet officially secret) IBM announcements of September 1990. IBM has STILL not realised that Amdahl's 1980s/90s commercial analysis was run from the UK and not the USA. We had recently been re-equipped with Compaq SLT 286s. These were certainly portable, but a pain in the t1ts if the elevators weren't working. A novelty - about the first portable PCs that would, if connected via the charger - survive a power outage without comment. The battery pack weighed about six pounds. We were working "hand-off". The idea was that we would do as much as possible and then "hand off" the current status to Sunnyvale. Time zone exploitation. Any ex-Amdahlers present - we're talking about PMG00600 to PMG00606. 54 hours without sleep. I guess there were around eight of us working on our response on the ground floor of Viking House in Hounslow - an ex-born again Christian bookshop. All of a sudden - the power went. A backhoe scenario. We selectively finished what we were doing on battery power, consolidated onto stiffies, and moved out to Amdahl's Axis House facility near Thiefrow Airport to transfer everything to the States. No fuss. But the surprise was a newspaper article the next week floating the vaguest of all possible suggestions that our power outage might have been arranged by Big Blue. -- Phil Payne http://www.isham-research.co.uk +44 7833 654 800 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
