On Fri, 1 Feb 2002, Andy Ruhl wrote:

> On Fri, 1 Feb 2002, Michael J. Miller Jr. wrote:
> 
> > When I worked at Sun as a contractor in the early 90's they did this to all
> > their internal machines as well.  Rumors ran rampant that a lot of people
> > were taking the old systems home instead of turning them in because of
> > this.  At the time Sun didn't do much in the way of property tracking, so
> > it was easy for people to get away with.
> 
> Pardon my asking, but what does this accomplish? Why not just smash the
> hard drive? Doesn't make sense...

If you're an automaker, you don't want cheap units entering the market.  It
undercuts your business.   If you're sun, you don't want to limit the market
on used equipment as much as you can since it has the potential to impact the
sale of new units. So once you've finished depreciating your equipment you 
destroy it.

I know sun also used to sell some of their used systems in the late 
80's.  I actually bought a couple of Sun 3 type systems from them.  A
3/75 and a 3/110.  Both were very nice systems for the time, and I believe
the 3/110 had a ... P4?  CG6 video card.  I later installed the video
card in a 4/110 I picked up some place.  That was a neat system as well,
though the faster 68020 based systems seemed to perform better.  I think
it had a 14.77MHz original Sparc CPU in it.

-- 
Mike Miller             mke @ turbolift.com