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First, IBM is not the only company to do this by a long shot. My father worked on systems starting in the 1960s and this was very common. He would go out to a customer to 'Upgrade' their 5GB disk unit to a 10GB unit. How? Snip a wire. A friend worked on plug compatible mainframes with four processing speeds (Magnuson I think?) They were all the same with jumpers to set the speed. When you reported problems the hex codes indicated where the jumpers were and if not where they belonged, you got nuttin for support. On occasion Dad would 'soup up' an 029 keypunch for someone who could out-type the stock machine. The change? Swap two gears. Unofficial and unsupported but it often worked. When it didn't the gears went back to 'stock' configuration.

As to 'setting the jumpers to get done faster' this is not the only reason. Turns out that everything run at 'full blast' is more likely to fail (note the 401 problem in this thread.) Good CEs woud 'turn em up' to see if they ran clean. If they ran clean at higher speeds they were almost certain to run clean at the lower speeds.

Even today my DIsh Network DVR has a USB port on it that I'm not allowed to use until I pay a fee. Nothing changes, just a key. And I'm OK with that because if I choose to use it there is no un-install/re-install. No waiting. No shipping charges. No visit from the DishDude. Just pay the money and in minutes it's good to go. I fail to see the downside.

Second: Anyone who has worked in manufacturing realizes that building 20 different models of the same darn thing instead of building them the same with 'jumpers' (or keys, or licenses or ....) will cost significantly more money. Thus EVERYONE pays more including the guy who somehow feels 'ripped off' because his machine 'has interactive in it but I'm told I don't get to use it!' And don't toss the automobile analogy at me because their volumes are so much higher that the economics are different.

Third: At the risk of skating just a tad to close to politics there are millions of folks who think that lots of things should be free. They would still be wrong.

- Larry

On 3/18/2010 11:32 AM, Dennis Lovelady wrote:
...<snip> I have coworkers who believe that it should just be part of the OS and you shouldn't have to pay extra for it.
<snip> IBM has been in that game for a very long time. When I first got started in
this bidness, IBM had a machine (401 Tab machine I think) that had a jumper
which limited the speed of its processes. There were actually two models,


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