Shrewsbury Team Ready for Robotics Competition
High Performance Solutions Center Opens in Nashua
Digital History on Display


Shrewsbury Team Ready for Robotics Competition

Students at Shrewsbury High School and some Shrewsbury Compaq engineers are preparing to travel to Philadelphia in March to participate in the first round of a national robotics competition. Sponsored by FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology), the program is being supported with $25,000 from Compaq and the expertise of six Compaq Alpha engineers and two managers: Jim Jenson, Binto John, John Kozura, Scott Weiland, Suma Kovvali, Nick Palmer, Darko Gojanovic, and Bill LaPrade.

The robotics competition is actually a bicoastal event, since Compaq is also sponsoring a team at Palo Alto High School in California. The friendly east-west competition among the engineers promises to add a little extra excitement to the event.

At the competition, the four-wheel-drive, six-wheeled robot will be required to pick up and collect 13-inch balls, lift them up, and put them into a six-foot-high goal. Designing and building the robot took 35 high school students, a few teachers and parents, and the Compaq engineers more than 4,000 hours to complete. Compaq also provided two high-performance PCs for the AutoDesk animation portion of the competition. Future issues of Highlights will keep you posted on the competition. In the meantime, you can learn more about FIRST and the robotics competition at http://www.usfirst.org. There is also a web page designed by the students.

High Performance Solutions Center Opens in Nashua

Compaq opened a state-of-the-art High Performance Solutions Center in Nashua, New Hampshire, on March 14. The new site dramatically broadens Compaq's capabilities to serve customers and partners in the high-performance market. By combining a demo center with a secure, advanced computer lab, Compaq can provide customers with a seamless path, all the way from demonstration and prototypes to production systems and volume manufacturing.

The center provides a multidisciplinary team environment where customers can address issues in high-performance computing, storage, high-speed networking, and the latest operating system technologies, including Linux, UNIX, Tru64™ UNIX®, OpenVMS, and Windows NT®.

Digital History on Display Compaq donated historical artifacts from Digital Equipment Corporation's museum collection to two museums with close historical ties to Digital. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Museum and the International Computing Museum (formerly known as the Computer Museum History Center) in Mountain View, California, each received DEC equipment valued at almost $1 million collectively. The donation comprised Digital products from the late 1950s system modules to the late 1980s VAX 9000, including product exhibits and historical exhibits created by Digital's Corporate Archives. The MIT Museum received Whirlwind components, display consoles, SAGE Air Defense System components, and a LINC 8 computer with manuals, all originally developed in MIT's research laboratories. The International Computing Museum received PDP and VAX components, including the PDP-1, PDP-4, PDP-5, PDP-8, PDP-12, LINC 8, VAX-11/780, VAX 9000, and related systems components.