help w/ Momentum Sys III Unix machine
Russell Lawrence
russ at wpg.UUCP
Thu May 12 04:15:38 AEST 1988
In article <4624 at mcdchg.UUCP>, friedl at vsi.UUCP (Stephen J Friedl) writes:
>
> Hi folks, hope I'm posting this in the right place. We
> recently picked up a (very) used Momentum Unix box at an auction.
> There is no marking on it to lead us to the manufacturer's city
> -- we think they have bitten the dust. The machine has a 68000,
> a pair of 80MB hard drives, a tape drive, and runs Unisoft Sys III.
> One of the Momentum-provided backup scripts has Bob Nystrom's name
> in it. We got this guy pretty cheap -- only $75.
>
> Does anybody know anything about this machine? We bought
> the machine for the hard drives but considering the machine seems
> to work we will use it for a little printer spooler or something.
Years ago I was looking for a GOOD but inexpensive unix machine and
my search led me to Computhink (alias Momentum) in Sunnyvale, CA. The key
people were Val Skalabrin (sales) and Sidney Plotkin (engineering).
After several discussions, I gave them an order for a trial machine but
when I got it in, I discovered a number of serious problems--- the biggest
being cheap drives. The straw that broke the camels back was discovered
after a quick glance through the libraries. It took about five seconds for
it to dawn on me that the sales rep had been fibbing when he said they had
a reconfigurable kernel --- (as though I wasn't going to notice when I got
the trial machine in.) Although it was Saturday morning, I called them
immediately and was put in touch with a "software engineer" who wanted to
know what a "kernel" was; later they gave me another person who swore up
and down that Bell licensing procedures did not permit ANY firm to sell
reconfiguration rights.
Anyway, the machine had come to us on a Saturday morning around 8:30 AM and,
as I recall, we had it packed up and back at the airport by noon. I
believe that the experience represented some kind of record as the shortest
test period on record.
I suspect you got a pretty good deal but NOT for the hard drives. I'm
wondering if you could plug in new hard drives that would be compatible with
the disk controller in the thing. As I recall, it was fast (but tough to
service) thanks to Plotkin's bus. If you hear of any more like it, let
me know.
---
Russell Lawrence, WP Group, POB 306, Metairie, LA 70004
AT&T: +1 504 456 0001 COMPUSERVE: 72337,3261
UUCP: {philabs,hpda,nbires,amdahl,...}!uunet!wpg!russ
More information about the Comp.unix
mailing list