| General Electric recently acquired RCA (formerly Radio Corporation of
America). RCA has been the parent company of the National Broadcasting
Company since its inception. National Broadcasting, is, of course, the
parent of NBC News. GE and RCA are Digital Corporate Accounts.
Previous to the last six local reorganizations, I supported the three
television networks. I'm now in the New York Financial District,
Digital's largest. The New York District supports the non-financial
customers and includes NBC News. By calling the New York District
sales manager (DTN 333 6280) you can get a pointer to the people who
now support the NBC account.
In general, the people you see noting from {BMT,IRT} are software
specialists and sales reps from New York.
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| The VTs that you see on the NBC set are unfortunately not connected
to VAXen at the current time but will be in the future. They are
connected to NBC's primary news information system. This is provided
by an English company called Basys (not to be confused with Battelle
Laboratories Basis product).
NBC has purchassed three 8500s to take over the application because
they had maxed out the previous HW (I don't remember the brand).
We, of course, would like to see this grow into something much
larger.
Despite the fact that RCA owns NBC and GE bought RCA with both RCA
and GE among our largest customers, the only result I have seen
in NBC is a solid move away from their Sperry systems to IBM
mainframes. I sometimes wonder what it would take to leverage a
DEC installed base if this scenario doesn't show it.
Incidentally, all of those nifty on screen graphics you saw in the
1984 election coverage on NBC was also done on VAXen.
Peter Dillard
NYD
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