On 06/03/2011 13:44, Always Learning wrote:
I also saw Honeywell upgrading a L66 machine so it would run faster. The engineer pulled-out a PCB and took it away. That 'upgrade' cost over 1 million NLG (Dutch guilders).
Very annoying those big iron companies. We had two banks of ICL Eagle drives (10GB in five full height filing cabinet sized boxes). We upgraded to Albatrosses (20GB) for a mill or so (don't know the actual price). All the engineer did was swap a couple of jumpers and told us to reformat in M2FM instead of MFM. Definitely worth the money.
In case of NC machines it was quite common that the amount of memory usable was just a configuration setting. After you paid a horrible amount of money a service engineer came, entered a special code, reconfigured the amount of memory and that was it. With a modem connection it could even be done remotely :)
Simon