Conference 7.286::digital

  You say tomato...

  Could it have been the thousands of plastic terminal and other cases that
  turned yellow?

  	mikeP

  ps I know of others but this seems to fit both categories as the cases
     should have been recycled as they were returned.

    
    Try contacting the people who deal with recycling of materials in
    the company, within the EH&S group.  (VTX EHS)
    
    --Sue
    

  TRAX?

                                   Atlant

    I -vaguely- recall that it had something to do with one of our early
    forays into what we today call Enterprise Servers. It was a big system,
    intended to compete in the big IBM-mainframe world.

Back in 1973, DEC recalled the VT50 for reliability.  The circuit boards 
were made of paperboard.  Normal wear and tear caused lifted etch 
open solder joints.  DEC recalled all units and swapped them for VT52s.

At the time this happened, recycling hadn't been invented.

Since then we've gotten much better at recycling.  The VT500 family was the 
first DIGITAL product that was designed to meet every environmental and 
recycling requirement, world-wide.  DIGITAL got a lot of good press for it.  
 
TRAX was a block mode transaction processing envionment (it may have been
classed as an operating system).  It was announced and retracted from the
market.  It couldn't be made to work.  As software, it wasn't hard to recycle.
The VT62, which was designed to support TRAX was killed almost the day it first
shipped.  There wasn't much to recall.

    THERE WAS ALSO A FLUID COOLED SYSTEM THAT DIGITAL SCRAPPED AS A VIABLE
    PRODUCT. ONE REASON WAS THE STORAGE AND DISPOSAL OF THE COOLING FLUID
    BECAUSE IT WAS CONSIDERED HAZARDOUS MATERIAL.
    

    If my memory serves me correctly, we also had a recall due to Silver
    plated leads on ICs.  We had silver migration between component leads
    creating shorts, which in turn led to system failures.  Those systems
    were recalled and reworked.  This happened in the late 70's.  The NRO
    labs did lots of work on this problem and perhaps the information is
    Archived in some corporate library.  I would suggest a search on
    Metal migration, silver migration, silver leads, etc.
    
    Good luck.

Hi Gene,

Digital's Envirnomental Health and Safety group in MSO may be able to
help you.  The program manager is Larry Nielsen (POWDML::NIELSEN).

Regards,
Alice

    Is it Larry or Leslie?  ;)
    

> Back in 1973, DEC recalled the VT50 for reliability.  The circuit boards 
> were made of paperboard.  Normal wear and tear caused lifted etch 
> open solder joints.  DEC recalled all units and swapped them for VT52s.

  Not in 1973, they didn't! The VT50 hit the streets around 1976,
  'bout the same time I did! And the paperboard circuit boards
  remained in the VT52 successors forever, although I think some
  later production (and certainly the add-on VT55 graphics
  module and VT78 PDP-8 module) were built of G10 or FR4 fiber-
  glass composite.

  But you're certainly right about the boards being junk.

                                   Atlant

    I'd plump for VAX 9000.
    
    In the UK most (all?) were replaced with an "attractive" deal for the
    cutomers. It was an impressive engineering feat, the VAX 9000 not the
    deal!
    
    Andrew

	Say what you will about the VAX 9000, but all in all, it was
	a good machine and very nicely engineered. It was just 5 years
	too late.

	FWIW, as of last year, I know for a fact that VAX 9000's were
	being reconditioned and resold. A number of them were going to
	U.S. Government sources, never to been heard from again. 
	(NoSuchAgency??) Whereever they were going, the people that
	got them love them.

	I had one in my cluster many years ago. VAX 9000-440 with *4*
	vector processors and 512MB of memory. It took awhile to get
	going, but once it did, it ran forever. I even had a proto
	of one with 2GB of memory for a while. Until that project
	got scrapped because the upgrade to 2GB cost more than
	a 3GB VAX 7000. Still, there were customers out there ready
	to pay.

	You'll never see a bemoth like that again. At least from DEC.

							mike

    
    Just switched off a customer VAX 9000 Model 420 (x2) Cluster 2 weeks
    ago - replaced by VAX 7000's.
    
    
    The air conditioning system is now only running at 20% capacity instead
    of 85%.
    
    Also we are consuming much less electricity ($$$$$$ worth less)..
    
    
    mark W.

>    The air conditioning system is now only running at 20% capacity instead
>    of 85%.
    
  I'm not surprised. The 9000 ran mostly on ECL chips which use huge amounts
of power. That is why the prototype was fluid cooled. It was thought that air
cooling could not dissipate the heat fast enough.

The VT50 hit the streets in late '74/early '75.  I took over the Westfield 
Line Printer refurb area when Ken Boardway transferred to the new VT50 line 
in '74.    and. the biggest drawback to the VT50 wasn't the circuit boards, 
it was the on-board hard copy output.  anyone remember THAT fiasco?

or how about the packaging fiasco?  K.O. went berserk when the skids and 
boxes were too big to fit through the door for simple office peripherals.

    ahh, yes... and to think we call those the good old days!
    
    t.

    Wasn't the printer version the VT55?  Did one of them ever work?

	I seem to remember it having a -H variant on on several VT's of the day.

    Gees, this reminds when we filled up the cafeteria and hallways with
    LA36's (so we wouldn't have to recall  8^). Anyone remember that?
    
    bc

    VT55 was the graphics version (sort of), largely marketed by LDP.

    The "H" stood for Hand, and was the keypad component.
    
    Deb

    I was sometimes asked to repair VT55's with thermal printers at
    a large customer site in 1980-81.  The customer used to tease me
    about the fact that most of the time I could repair his tri-SMP 
    DECsystem-10's faster than the VT55's.  (Sad but true!)

The thermal printer controller board was a pain to build too.  I still remember
the number 54-01164.  Back then, it still required magic to build product.