[rescue] How I started, was Re: fire v210 upgrade

[Steven M Jones]

Well in part I blame a LINC that was retired-in-situ at my prep school.
The year I started was the last year the seniors were using it, and it
was strictly off-limits to the likes of me. They left it to be picked
apart by bored students in the computer lab for a further year but I
couldn't get over how cool it looked compared to the Apple ]['s. I mean,
that was a REAL computer with blinky lights and everything!

While working at MIT in 1990 I got a support call from somebody in one
of the labs. Seems they'd been given a VAX-11/730 to use as a personal
machine earlier in the year, and the R80 was going bad Somehow it wasn't
covered under the campus support contract, but eventually one of the
other labs gave her a retired 11/780 and a rack of RA82s -- space
apparently wasn't a problem in her lab.

After a brief chat with the Surplus Property Office, I somehow got to
take the 11/730 home. A coworker and I spent a _very_ cold evening
partially disassembling it so we could lift it into a borrowed VW
Microbus. I had it running in my dining room for a while but couldn't
salvage the R80 and, full of youthful optimism, I pitched the R80
thinking it would be easier to replace the drive with a different
storage subsystem...

--S.