Dangerous Hardware 2488
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I'm a programmer, but I used to have to deal with a couple of Siemens 0777 laser printers (laserdrucken). They were very...
Phil Weldon
The IBM MSS a.k.a. 3850 was a large tape robot (large storage for many tapes, with quite a few tape drives to read...
I got one of those, too.
The company I worked for in 1989 made Automated Voice Response systems. The machine designs dated back to the early 70's with the messages recorded on film disks. Later designs incorporated micro-processors and messages stored in EPROMs.
We got a contract from an overseas client to build a machine that spoke English and Arabic. We had to go to the diplomatic mission in order to hire a student to record the messages. And then the client rejected the vocabulary because they didn't like the accent of the student. Being a proud people, they didn't want their machine to sound like the people north of the border, so we had to go back and find another student with an acceptable accent.
After much mucking about (including convincing the export authorities that the 1 MHz 2650 micro-processor was not restricted technology) we finally got the machine delivered to the client.
The National Bank of Kuwait.
Right before the Iraqi invasion.
The looting Iraqis took everything from the bank, chairs, typewriters and somewhere on a north-bound truck sat an AVR system that spoke in a Kuwaiti accent, not the reviled Iraqi accent.