And most of it had likely been bandaided, "held together with bailing twine", stripped of parts to make another system work ... that's where we were in the mid 1980s with a number of perfectly fine old test platforms that occupied 25% of the test floor. I mentioned DICOMs in a previous thread of yours a few weeks ago. They were essentially digital cassette readers that read the compiled test program and loaded it into the wire wrap core memory of the test systems. Those DICOMs were the weak link and spare parts discontinued. The equipment techs would scavenge every decent part off the junk DICOMs to maintain the working units. Each system had to have it's own DICOM in the manufacturers configuration. I created a central loader system, had to sniff all the test programs as they were being read/transferred to the core because there was no other way to read them from the proprietary cassette and file format. The HP Instrument controllers were great for stuff like this. Once I had the library established, the rest was mostly writing code to support the central loader setup. At the time that seemed like a major leap forward in technology. I saved the company a lot of money, increased throughput and equipment utilization with dramatically reduced downtime using equipment we already owned. I would not want to be working with that old crap today.