[geeks] nerd reading for a Friday night ... old-skool waxed twine lacing

[Lionel Peterson]

>From: Sandwich Maker <adh at an.bradford.ma.us>
>Date: 2007/01/28 Sun PM 11:12:40 CST
>To: geeks at sunhelp.org
>Subject: Re: [geeks] nerd reading for a Friday night ... old-skool waxed 
twine lacing

<snip>

>here's one:
>
>i started at bl a month before the first breakup, as a contractor.  i
>was there 7 years.
>
>regular mts-level employees could sign purchase orders up to $1k
>without other approval.  a friend discovered he could get starlan
>cards for our group's unixpcs for $795, and driver s/w for another
>$795 - so he wrote 24 purchase orders, to equip all dozen of our
>little unix boxes around the group.  we grabbed rj45 cables from the
>stockroom and threw them over the walls and hey presto...
>
>we didn't have any sort of mandate for this, we just wanted to learn
>about networking.  he got some notoriety for his spending, but no
>static that i ever heard of.  and that network became the foundation
>of a project his group took on two years later.
>--
>we weren't encouraged to spend money [though it could look that way],
>we were encouraged to feed our curiousity.  bell labs was structured
>to get the -best- from its employees, not the -most-.  that's
>something that pays dividends in ways that are difficult to
>bottomline.

Bellcore was similar (we called them "flash" purchases. Stories of 
workstaions bought "one piece at a time" were legion.[0] There were vendors 
that would sell you power supply and case on one flash order, then the MB on 
another, RAM on a third, and HD on a fourth. However, they would kindly ship 
the orders in one box, as supplied by the Mfg. Eventually, Bellcore said no 
CPUs could be sold on flash orders, unless they were upgrade CPUs ;^)

I got a lot of books from flash orders, that was real nice.

Lionel