minicomputers
Systems Engineering Laboratories, Inc. [SEL]
Below are some sotries which I've collected by several of the engineers who worked at this company.
George Dragner always wore a belt with a metal dragon buckle. He was a colorful character known for pissing off management. His most famous act was tossing a chair through the window at a customer site. The customer refused to believe that the lack of humidity in the room was screwing up his magnetic tape media. As the tape heads depend on the moisture from the air to prevent the magnetic oxide from being torn off the media from the friction during a rewind. George broke the window to prove his point. He was right ! The customer was the Canadian National Research Council, it was a radio telescope site in Algonquin park. It took 4 hours by train traveling north west of Ottawa. Just tell the conductor to slow down the train so you can jump off. The train doesn't stop there in the winter, the snow prevents sufficient traction to start up again on the slope.
Some of the marketing angles that were used by SEL was to brand the SEL810 machine with a different model number, SEL600, which was designated as an electronic device with an embedded computer in order to gain more sales. It had everything to do with getting around the corporate committees inside big companies that had IT departments which were heavily influenced by IBM.
If there's any machine that I might have missed, or if you know of any good stories about the company and/or it's customers, please send the info and I'll make sure it gets added to this webpage.