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Re: Alden finality? future? (fwd)


===============================================================================
Robb Kambic                                Unidata Program Center
Software Engineer III                      Univ. Corp for Atmospheric Research
address@hidden             WWW: http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/
===============================================================================

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Tue, 10 Oct 2000 12:16:05 -0400 (EDT)
From: Eric Horst <address@hidden>
To: address@hidden
Subject: Re: Alden finality? future?

So where do we go from here?

I know that Art Person (PSU) and all of us here at Millersville are committed
to maintaining a DIFAX mapwall in our respective institutions. There are other
possibilities such as UNISYS...so I think we need to get UNIDATA involved, 
despite the fact they live and breath in the "electronic map world". But
down here where the rubber meets the road, paper difax maps are still a
fundamental part of the educational and forecast process.

Eric Horst
Millersville Univ.

> From address@hidden Tue Oct 10 12:05:40 2000
> Date: Tue, 10 Oct 2000 08:54:18 -0500 (CDT)
> From: David Wojtowicz <address@hidden>
> To: address@hidden
> Subject: Re: Alden finality?
> MIME-Version: 1.0
> 
> On Tue, 10 Oct 2000, Jim Koermer wrote:
> 
> > Our ku-band DIFAX from Alden seemed to stay around a bit longer, but
> > things may have come to their final end around 09/2000Z. We haven't
> > received anything since that time and the receiver is showing no signal.
> > Is anyone else still receiving Alden DIFAX through ku-band?
>  
> 
> I hope you or anyone else didn't lose out on a pre-paid annual contract.
> We had fortunately gone to monthly payments in August to keep DIFAX
> going a little longer for one particular user here.    I guess you
> get to keep the equipment though. (Not that it's worth anything
> without being activated)
> 
> > It is really a shame that such a good company for so many years had to
> > end this way.
> > 
> 
> Besides very bad management in general, it seem that they were becoming
> a dinosaur.... and we know what happened to the dinosaurs.
> 
> I recall the days when you'd call service and get an old timer who could
> talk you through every minute detail of repairing your Alden wet chemical
> paper difax machine.  I then remember calling about a service outage in
> the early days of IDD DIFAX delivery and the person I got politely
> informed me that I must have the wrong company because they didn't
> distribute data over the "inter-net".  Sure, they got some newer more
> modern people over time, but it seems like they kept leaving (How many
> different IDD support contacts did we go through?) Perhaps they were
> frustrated with the work environment.   At one time they designed
> all sorts of high tech (for the time) electronics, but it seems like
> they never could quite keep up with the pace of change.
> 
> --------------------------------------------------------
>  David Wojtowicz, Sr. Research Programmer/Systems Manager
>  Department of Atmospheric Sciences Computer Services
>  University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
>  email: address@hidden  phone: (217)333-8390
> --------------------------------------------------------
> 
> 
> 
>