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In the early 80's I worked for a company that made semiconductor test equipment. We received an order from a company in West Germany for a unit that we did not believe we would ever get permission to sell to them from DRPA and State.

We had already designed into the machine a password capability that locked out the process if the correct password was not typed in - three failures and it locked it out. Required a human service call to reset it.

In any case we received almost immediate permission to ship the unit. As the VP of Customer Support I scheduled a visit to install the machine and train the users. We could NEVER get a good date and at one point I sent an employee to "visit" he found an empty warehouse at the address for the company with one very old "janitor". He got out of the guy that the company had "moved" but not where too. As the years went by I wondered what happened to that machine. About two years after the wall went down I got a call from a Russian company in Moscow. They had the machine and could we come and fix it. It was password locked out and had been for a long time.

Thanks for this story I now believe I know what happened to the missing machine.