[rescue] Resurrecting an IBM RS/6000 model 590

[Francisco Javier Mesa-Martinez]

On Mon, 9 Feb 2004, Jonathan C. Patschke wrote:

>
> On Mon, 9 Feb 2004, Francisco Javier Mesa-Martinez wrote:
>
> > You have not lived until you have seen a Connection Machine being smashed
> > to bits with big hammers.
>
> *wibble*
>
> Whomever was responsible for that deserves the same fate!

It was that day in the mid 90s that it became painfuly clear that MBA
types are just evil. I was a working bee at evil defence contractor, and
they had retired a beautiful CM-200, a few people wanted to save the
machine. Manager asshole decided that it had "confidential information" (I
guess he is unable to distinguish between compute and storage) and just to
be a fucking passive aggresive asshole decided to bring in some people to
demolish the machine, and then send it to the recycle. I am sure he made
so that engineering types knew who was in charge. I was much too young to
fully appreciate what had happened, but there it was a full 200 series
connection machine destroyed just because of internal politics, my mentor
-one of the best damn old school engineers i have ever known wasn't too
happy about it- and a bunch of his buddies had gone through countless loops
and hoops to get the machine and in the end they were left with nothing. :(
It is not like it takes much to maintain true geeks happy, shit 25+ years
working there, grossly underpayed and talented bunch of people, only thing
that they really wanted was to have some cool iron just because they could
run it in their garage... but noooooo, that is too freakkin' much to ask
for. I guess you have to sell your soul to pay for the student loans in
order to pay for your MBA (I know it is a gross generalization), but come
on not even a frikkin' bone!

Oh well.... there are however some cool companies around here, and a bunch
of my friend work there so they get some cool perks. Funny how it is so
damn easy to make geeks happy :) (sad and scary sometimes).