A couple of years ago I wandered down the wrong aisle in one of our data centres and came upon a Data General Eclipse still powered up and apparently in use.
A couple of years ago my father and I scrapped the last of the Rainbows (not rare enough for a museum to be interested) and a Micro PDP 11/23 (no interest from museums or UK PDP enthusiasts, and too hard to ship internationally). It was a sad day.
(I still have several boards from a DG computer on my office wall. Geek porn...)
I agree that its a great book, these days it would be much less dramatic with everything running on simulators prior to chip tapeout.
My Mom worked at Data General and she used to take home some transparent masks for chips that were "corporate trash". She made art out of them and they're still hanging in her house.
Same here, pretty much. That was a very influential book for me. I went back and read it again a couple of years ago, and it was still fascinating. Then I found out a guy at our local Hackerspace was there during some of that time and knows some of the folks mentioned in the book. That made it all seem even more real to me... quite an interesting story in any case.