🚀 go-pugleaf

Another followup to amazing feats of shocking computer equipment:
about six years ago back when IOMEGA was coming out with their first
Brenoulli boxes for the PC, they were bigger and heavier than the PCs 
and came in dual 9-inch cartridge drive mechanisms (each holding a
whopping 10 megs per cartridge).. These babies ran around $2500-$3000,
and were quite a good deal back then.

This is something I heard back when I was a volunteer at the BCS, and
is not verified, but apparently, when the IOMEGA guys were demonstrating
how durable these hard drives were, they would start a long disk access
and push the huge thing off the table onto the ground. It would hit the
ground with a thud (keep in mind these were about the size of a PC
and about 40 pounds or more)... The message on the screen would be
"read error - abort retry or ignore." The salesperson would retry and
the rest of the file would be loaded in without any problems.

Keeping in mind this was back when corvus was a  popular hard drive maker
and everyone was petrified if you even breathed on one of these
(lest it cause a crash) this was quite a big deal...

-- 
S. Alan Ezust                                   dep...@calvin.cs.mcgill.ca
McGill University School of Computer Science -  Montreal, Quebec, Canada