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Re: Alden finality? (fwd)

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  • Subject: Re: Alden finality? (fwd)
  • Date: Tue, 10 Oct 2000 08:53:33 -0600 (MDT)

===============================================================================
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 08:54:18 -0500 (CDT)
From: David Wojtowicz <address@hidden>
To: address@hidden
Subject: Re: Alden finality?

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
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