🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1989Dec14.2...@cs.rochester.edu> k...@cs.rochester.edu writes:
>Ok, a story. Somebody can repost the comp.risks article, but it really
>isn't that complicated. Seems some photog was taking publicity pictures
>in a machine room and crashed the machine everytime he took a picture.
>Eventually they realized that the flash was getting into the optical
>sensors and all the tape drives were seeing EOT at once. Sigh, exabytes
>and cartridge tapes are no fun. :-)


Which brings up another great story ... it goes that one of the very first
transistor based computer systems was built and was running perfectly until
they put the skins on the cabinet to make it look nice - everything stopped
working, they took them off - it started up again ... turned out some of the
transistors were acting as phototransistors and depended on being illuminated
in order to get their job done - the solution ... light bulbs in the cabinets!



Another great story (this one was told in CACM a few years ago) is about one
of the first IBM Stretch machines. It had code memory which in order to make
it go fast enough was oil cooled. One machine had an intermittant problem
with the memory subsystem this totally mystified the engineers working on
it untill someone noticed that the memory would fail at addresses that 
increased to the end then restarted, finally someone had a bright idea -
they realized that there was a flake of solder in the cooling oil shorting
out different parts of the core stacks as it circulated - the result was the
first computer which was repaired by giving it an oil change (just try
taking you Vax down to Jiffy-Lube these days :-)

	Paul



-- 
Paul Campbell    UUCP: ..!mtxinu!taniwha!paul     AppleLink: CAMPBELL.P
"We got a thousand points of light for the homeless man,
Got a kinder, gentler, machine gun hand ..." - Neil Young 'Freedom'