I have the Tandem mug with two handles, for redundancy. I got it back in 1985.

I worked at tandem in the 90s. I remember a demo where someone on stage took a revolver and shot up the server. It kept going.

I was at COMDEX (former large computer show in Las Vegas) in the late eighties, at one point the power went out in half of the huge convention hall.

We all heard the loud voice from the Tandem booth: "We're still up!"

"Pieper....a hard charging sales executive"....putting "sales executives" in charge of technology companies only ends one way

At Cellular One / AT&T we used to joke if we had cables long enough to keep it connected the Tandem HLR could be dropped from a C130 and still work after falling to the ground.

I’ve pretty much made an entire working career involved with these machines. Great times have, and are still being had. Amazing community of vendors and customers and I’m totally honoured to have been involved.

OMG... my career in YouTube.  Thanks Jon!  I was in a Tandem shop from 1985/2000.  Everything you mentioned was swirling around the office.  I was an application software engineer, so I wasn't all that concerned about the hardware.  But I am so glad I ended up working on Tandems.  Great machines!  (I just copied my comments from your Patreon page)

I used to work for a cable provider, and our billing system ran on Tandem NonStop. Not the friendliest operating system to work with, and not the absolute fastest hardware, but that thing was bulletproof. In eleven years, the Tandem was only ever offline once: during a massive OS upgrade that took 6 hours and involved a tiger team from HP. The backup Tandem carried the active load for the duration. Our users never noticed a thing.

Regardless of the AI slop that floods YT with robovoice and disconnected images,  your photogallery is outstanding. A complete time machine into another world that we come from. The minor detail that your content is absolutely outstanding as well is just a given on your channel.

I worked on a tandem computer from the early 70s. It was still running in 2005, and I think it still is today. It never shut down, as it was essential to the national telecommunications network.

I worked at Tandem while in grad school, 1983-85. Jimmy was a satelite packet radio enthusiast. Each office had a dish and every employee had email.

Eventually, Holiday Inn decided to include the price of the breakfast in the price of the room. Easy.

The amount of man hours to get a full proprietary OS and software stack to work well and that reliability must be staggering

I worked on a Tandem system at a bank - it ran an EFT switch called BASE24 under GuardianOS and you programmed it in TAL (Tandem Application Language).

NonStop SQL was built into the OS so all apps had SQL capabilities - it was OLTP king.
It was the MIPS based system and one day Tandem US contacted us saying one of CPU's had misbehaved and that it's jobs were migrated seamlessly to the others and we might want to log a service call to the local agents.

The only other competition at banks was Stratus machines running VOS.

"I am alive" messages are typically referred to as "heartbeat" messages.

I worked for DEC as a Solutions Architect in the mid-1990s to early 2000s. DEC was bought by Compaq (what a mistake!) along with Tandem in the late 1990s. I used to hang out with the Tandem engineers marveling at their NonStop systems. Then HP bought Compaq and the whole house of cards fell apart.

You always have the coolest stuff that I've never even heard of even though I'm crazy into this stuff

My grandma worked for Tandem her whole life. She retired there. She had awards on her book shelf from Tandem Computers. She had a Tandem Computer at home. It had 2 cd-roms, 8 hdd's raid no doubt, 2 mother boards yes two of them linked with a wide ribbon cable, 2 cpu's on each mother board so a total of 4, used scsi on everything, redundant dual power supplies, diagnostic lights on the front, on wheels, front lockout. I was too young at the time to know what everything was but I do remember being blown away how two motherboards can be linked together like that and how it worked. It was awsome. 😊

Employee #2123. I worked for Tandem from 1981 to 1997. They were by far the premier computer company to work for back in the day! It was my greatest work experience in my entire career!

Thanks for the video. I was at Tandem for 20+ years starting in the 80s. It was a great experience.