Our engineers used to make a mint by doing "diagnostics" for a full weekend on a system which had failed. Usually to make sure that the new board they'd fitted had "seated properly". This was quite important but it always struck me as a bit of a liberty to charge so much extra at double time just to watch a screen (though they made it look much more difficult).
Towards the end of the product life we sold a Wang VS5000 which was a small v powerful machine. That had a souped up version which, like yours,m was removal of a jumper to free the real power of the CPU. It was many many thousands more expensive.
I sometimes feel that IT budgets must really be a fraction pf what they used to be but I suppose that not true. But we used to have a monopoly on support contracts on the massively expensive hardware for most of the product life and I can't imagine how you could spend that much money these days on anything equivalent.
As the VS range was nearing it's life end we laid off some very clever engineers and support people and some 3rd party support organisations evolved - but we hung onto the source code for the OS and products so they could massively undercut us on run-of-the-mill maintenance but at the end of the day couldn't do the whole job.
|
