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> I suspect that, in true HP tradition, its products continue to be fairly expensive, culturally distinct, equipped with voluminous and sometimes mysterious documentation, occasionally quirky to the point of hysterical laughter, and utterly indispensable in their particular niches There was an HP minicomputer in one of the EE labs at Caltech circa 1980. It had the software that ran the EEPROM programmer, and if I recall correctly it also had the 68k cross assembler you needed if you were building a 68k project. The documentation was mysterious and the system was quirky, to the point that no one actually understood the thing. Everyone just knew the magic commands they had to type to burn ROMs and such. The thing was nearly full, and it was getting hard to work with. You had to upload files, work with them, and then delete them, so there would be room for the next person. One day, my lab partner and I figured out that a certain part of the file name/path was probably a drive name. Out of curiosity, we bumped it up and issued a command, just to see what the error message was when you tried to access a non-existent drive. There was no error. The command worked. It turned out the damn thing had two drives, but no one had known (and so of course the second drive was all free space)! |