From: Ray Bayles (raybay_at_broadcast.net)
Date: Thu Oct 18 2001 - 23:53:35 EDT
I worked for a certain Federal agency that bought a bunch of those
Grid computers... everyone of them failed within a year... then Grid
couldn't provide service or parts... huge fiasco... The Navy Seals
switched to Thinkpad 760ED's before they were released to the public.
They had 40 MB RAM and .8 or 1.2 GB hard drives at the time, but they
never, ever failed. And people would never give them up
Mitchell Yee wrote:
>
> Ahhh, you're bringing me back to the good
> old days at Stanford Research Inst. A
> certain government agency gave us latitude
> to spec out portable computers (this was the
> mid-80s) that were rugged. We had Grid Computer
> prototype us these very flat black portables
> that booted into DOS and ran all of the
> software from 64 KB eproms. One 64 KB eprom
> held DOS. There was at least one
> field accessible socket where you could drop
> in an eprom that had something like Lotus 123
> or Framework burned in.
>
> It was very expensive. But the gov't agency
> didn't want a ton, just enough, for certain
> operations that required transportation by
> parachutes.
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