Shmuel (Seymour J.) Pedantic Metz offered us some of his acclaimed wisdom and experience by stating:
> Would that that were true. > I was never at a shop where they were rented, First: What time period are you referring to, here? Interesting. Both of my (very old) copies of the green book do not even exhibit a purchase price for the 1416. I have never known of any shop that purchased any print train (from IBM). I did purchase some from Documation (a.k.a. Memorex). Were you working for the US Government at the time to which you refer? I know that it did become possible to buy them, at some point. I suspect this was because of some lawsuit or complaint from an OEM. Regardless, in the timeframe of the original discussion, it was not (officially) possible. I became aware of the fact that, years later, it was possible to purchase one, but I don't remember now when that became possible. Regardless, it was still an RPQ (no purchase price listed in the sales manual), and so darn horribly expensive [at the time] that no shop in its right mind would even consider doing so (hence my question about you being at a US Government shop, which I have some experience with myself -- particularly their general insanity and stupidity), because ... > the cost of replacing worn slugs was considerable. Yep. You said it. IBM didn't want to sell one at all. I don't know why, really. Nobody at IBM claimed to _really_ know, either. I'd love to know the actual reason; I think it had something to do with a policy that was a holdover from the days before when IBM just didn't _sell_ anything, whatsoever. The print trains were exempted from that requirement for some reason, presumably a good one (or good at the time). But, that's all just speculation on my part. The joke was that IBM made more money renting print trains than their computer hardware competitors made selling computers. Unfortunately (for some), the joke was true, but not because IBM charged a lot for print trains (they charged enough!), but because the BUNCH was so horrible at making any real money, regularly. > Such an alternate train would have required an > alternate UCS image. Duh! So? It was such a popular HASP mod that the HASP newsletter printed examples of how to do it -- right. > I never saw a shop that modified a TN or T11 UCS > instead of assigning a new name. Duh! So? Everybody still _called_ it a "TN" train. You want me to go back now and make them change what they said? -- WB ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
