[chanakya]

Wow, this brings back memories! Around 1986, I used to work for a state government electronics company in India, and we tied up with Convergent to build their Unix servers in India. We chose the MightyFrame, bigger and more powerful than the MiniFrame in the video. I remember travelling several times to the Bay Area to understand the product and how to manufacture it.

Not that we really learned how to do that: Convergent had a high-volume manufacturing line with high levels of automation. They destructively heat tested at least 25-30 servers before starting to ship, while our entire production was expected to be 50-75!

Had to design a totally different production process with manual placement of components, a simple wave soldering machine, a row of women doing rework and jumpering on the soldered PCBs and R&D / Design engineers like me transferring to manufacturing for several months to make all this happen. Had a blast, though, and we built them well, and the product sold well in India.

[ggm]

They probably reused the outcome for pre sales tech elsewhere with challenging conditions to repair eg oilfields, mining. Did you achieve/exceed 50 sales?

[chanakya]

We did exceed 50, though it took a while. We produced about 75 of them all together in a batch, and then took 2-3 years to sell them.

[denton-scratch]

Convergent and CTIX was my introduction to *nix.