Re:Manawyrm/ISA8019 – RTL8019-based ISA network card, NE2000...
by Spooky23 on Thursday December 03, 2020 @07:48PM
(#25297606)
Not at all. This is fun stuff.
There is a booming business in recycled gear.
An old boss retired and started getting calls from other geezers who were getting calls from old clients (he was a CE for DEC and SGI way back).
He ended up starting a little business with maintenance contracts or subcontracts with other providers. A couple of years ago he was making a good buck and had 7-8 guys in the field.
Usually customers were really big or really small and had some ancient system that was too expensive to figure out. One utility depended on a cluster of 33Mhz PowerPC AS/400 boxes to do their billing — they paid a lot of money for best effort break fix. Another used 286 PCs for controlling elevators.
There is a booming business in recycled gear.
An old boss retired and started getting calls from other geezers who were getting calls from old clients (he was a CE for DEC and SGI way back).
He ended up starting a little business with maintenance contracts or subcontracts with other providers. A couple of years ago he was making a good buck and had 7-8 guys in the field.
Usually customers were really big or really small and had some ancient system that was too expensive to figure out. One utility depended on a cluster of 33Mhz PowerPC AS/400 boxes to do their billing — they paid a lot of money for best effort break fix. Another used 286 PCs for controlling elevators.