Stabsstelle (advisory board)

No, this object is not a flute or an organ... In German you can make a pun with the word stabsstelle: stab means stick and also staff; stelle means position.

Our computing centres was responsible for coordinating all IT activity in the Oerlikon Buehrle group. Hence I used the pun to visualise the importance of our company. Since the 'pwoer' of our computing centre grew exponentially in those times , the length of the sticks in this object are measured with a logarithmic scale. The stick to the right has marks at 1, 2, 5, 10, 20, 50 and 100. The unit for measuring the power of a computer in those times (1996) was Mips (millions instructions per second).

You can see that at the time of presenting this gift to my boss the coputers had a power of 20 Mips. The sticks to the far left are smaller than 1 (Mips) and hence do not look out of the base... The first (hidden) stick is for 1976 when the computing center started with an IBM 360/40 which in those times costed about 3 Millions CHF.

The manger of our computing centre thanked warmly for the gift which he placed on his desk for years !