Columbia University Computing History   

The Kermit Factory

The Kermit factory
The Kermit factory (2001)
A portion of the Kermit production area in the Penthouse of Watson Laboratory, Jan 2001. From here you can step out onto the roof and get a great, if not exactly panoramic, view of the Hudson River. The cabinet in the center of the photo contains Watsun (a Sun Sparc-10) on the second shelf (just a beige pizza box, not much to look at); disks on the top and third shelf. Fourth shelf: assorted tape cartridge drives (8mm, 4mm DAT; QIC). Fifth shelf: a genuine 9-track trape drive in a pull-out drawer (HP).

The bottom two shelves contain Sun and Rolm serial ports. A shrinkwrapping device is on the table; a supply cabinet is to the left, the official Kermit Handtruck to the right. Not so long ago we made and shipped hundreds of tapes, cartridges, and diskettes each week from this room. In the Internet era, the demand for magnetic media (but not kermit software itself) shrunk to about zero. (This room was vacated by the Kermit Project in January 2004 and became offices for other AcIS groups.)

Columbia University Computing History Frank da Cruz / fdc@columbia.edu This page created: January 2001 Last update: 3 April 2021