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Comment by reaperducer | Hacker News Reader

Spoiler: It's a stack of Intel NUCs.

Funny how the world has changed.

I got my first taste of real computing from a guy in the next town who would buy dead PDP's from local McDonald's restaurants, fix them up, and sell them on.

He always said the hardest part wasn't replacing broken parts, it was that invariably the machines would always have soda spilled in them, no matter where they were stored. Cleaning the insides was his most time-consuming task.

One of the advantages of an Intel NUC is that it probably has a lot more horsepower than an old PDP/11. It's probably also a smaller target for wayward beverages.

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Used to work for a very large POS system provider, and I can confirm that soda spills make repairs take 10x longer.

I'd like to hear the story of why a McDonalds would need a PDP. Weren't they...expensive? They would be at the heart of university's IT department, or running a steel mill. Stuff like that. But until PCs came out, at a restaurant I can only picture registers and a dumb terminal hooked up to a distant mainframe.

The logistics improvements from early computers were massive. If you compare the equivalent price nowadays it's not worth it compared to other options, but going from paper to computing wasn't just an incremental improvement but allowed for entirely new abilities.

It wasn't like having an account to crunch all the numbers on staff full time was cheap. Especially when you'd have to have 3-4 accountants just to have 24 hour service, regardless of the work load

McDonald's corporate has or used to have a royalty fee for each item sold. That's a lot of tracking of sales info in the early days...

I spilled beer all over my laptop keyboard once, so I stripped it down and cleaned down the whole thing with isopropyl alcohol. It was a really annoying task, I can't imagine how annoying it would be with soda in a PDP.

I used to work in a hospital and the worst problem was keyboards full of blood. I would rather clean up soda all day long. :)

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