>Hey, Bob, what ever happened to the Harris 24 bit mini-computer? We bought one for the Univ. of Alabama Medical School in the 70's when it would run rings around Prime and HP. We put a 300 MB Control Data disk on that sucker. Sounded like a jet aircraft warming up when you turned it on.
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>There's an obscure FoxPro tie-in. The first version of dBase was called Vulcan by the original developer (Ratcliffe at JPL, right?). Harris made him change the name because that was the name of the OS on the Harris mini-computer.
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>Peter Robinson

Hi Peter,
I've only been at Harris about five years, so I don't know the history of their mini's. I am familiar with the start-up sounds of the old hard drives, I used to run a giant 10 mb (5 fixed, 5 removable) with dBase on a Radio Shack Model 12. There was a warning in the hard drive instruction manual not to get your wristwatch too close to the drive magnets! It literally rocked the desk when it did a seek.

I believe the gentleman's name was Wayne Ratlitt and he was with JPL. Vulcan was an offshoot of JPLDIS (Data Information System I believe), an electronic library cross-reference. I wasn't aware that their was a confict with Harris over the name but I'll file that away with my store of useless information :>).
Thanks.