> WTF? Varian was a competitor of DEC. They made minis themselves. Sounds > extremely strange that one would take a DEC mini, and put a Varian badge > on it. Did someone try to make a joke?
I will always think of Varian as a maker of (very high quality) vacuum equipment. I am sure this was not a joke. It wasn't just the name, the switch handles were all green, the silkscreening was different, etc. It was a normal PDP8/e inside, though. It was part of a piece of lab equipment (I forget what) and I had to do a minor repair on the PDP8/e side (this was over 20 years ago...). I was pleased to see that apart from a custom interface board, the rest of it was standard DEC boards, so the printsets I had applied. Incidentally, for those who like HP handhelds, the original HP41C manual has a photo on the title page of each chapter. One of them clearly shows _Tektronix_ instruments (!) -tony
