It was nice to see Nortel mentioned in the article because I did my "gap year" at Bell Northern Research/Standard Telephones & Cables Ltd (R&D arm of Northern T

It was nice to see Nortel mentioned in the article because I did my "gap year" at Bell Northern Research/Standard Telephones & Cables Ltd (R&D arm of Northern Telecom) back in the 90s and there were several of these SPARCbooks that the Meridian folks used to take with them on remote jobs. I was a mere youngster "helping" to write C code to convert Nortel switch signalling into OSI-standard CMIS. I never got to use one of the SPARCbooks of course but for that year I had an incredible SPARCstation IPX and learned so much from all the crusty old telco engineers. Great post about the SPARCbooks and what a great purchase!