3 ms·
I work in a 50 year old hospital. There was some work on the nurse call bell system and the maintenance staff had to scour eBay for old parts to fix the outdat
by giarc 11y ago
I work in a 50 year old hospital. There was some work on the nurse call bell system and the maintenance staff had to scour eBay for old parts to fix the outdated system. I think procurement had a fit when they saw eBay receipts show up.
- acomjean 11y agoI worked on a radar project with a similar problem. The target system was a computer called HP superdomes. HP discontinued those (the PA-RISC version anyway) . I think they bought a couple spares. Ebay was mentioned as a source for parts, which doesn't always give you a good feeling.
- acveilleux 11y agoIn a previous job at a University, we had a couple SGI big irons from the 1999-2002 era. A 64-way Origin 3800 and a 16-way Onyx 3800. Along with a similar vintage SAN and some misc bits. When I left in 2010, eBay was the source of something like one replacement HDD per 10-14 days for the SAN (73GB dual-port fibre channel, full-height...) and the two machines (made of modular "bricks") had been whittled down to a single franken-SGI of something like 20 CPUs. Some of the older processing workload still ran on there (i.e.: the student graduated ages ago...) A few dual 5300-series (8 cores) Xeons had replaced the SGIs in most workloads and left the old 500Mhz R14000 far in the dust. Lots more RAM too. Let's not even get started on the advantage as far as HVAC and power went.