Article View: alt.folklore.computers
Article #979Re: Hitting the Fan
From: a... Andrew MacRae
Date: Fri, 19 Jan 1990 20:31
Date: Fri, 19 Jan 1990 20:31
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The company I worked for 10 years ago was a big user of PDP-11/34s. About that time DEC began selling replacement front panels. Instead of nifty toggle switches and lights you could have a keypad (octal of course) and an LED readout. We had put in a call for maintenance on a band printer. The tech who came out decided to replace the old front panel with one of the new ones as long as he was out at our shop. This was on a Friday afternoon, late, and he didn't bother to test it out afterwards. After all, all you have to do is hook up a few wires, right? On Monday morning when we powered up that machine, we heard funny clicking and ticking sounds, then the whole machine went dead. After pulling the front panel off we found the problem; the guy had run the wires for the panel *through* the fans. Hey, it was the shortest distance, and the blades weren't moving anyway. When we powered up, the fan blades had started chopping away at the wires until they were cut, at which point everything shut down. Oh yes, he hadn't gotten around to fixing the printer either.
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Path: mbox-mo1.pugleaf.net!utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!usc!apple!sun-barr!newstop!jethro!grendal!acm From: a...@grendal.Sun.COM (Andrew MacRae) Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Subject: Re: Hitting the Fan Message-ID: <732@jethro.Corp.Sun.COM> Date: 19 Jan 90 20:31:33 GMT References: <1990Jan15.181808.1352@newcastle.ac.uk> <16867@cc.usu.edu> Sender: ne...@jethro.Corp.Sun.COM Reply-To: acm@sun.UUCP (Andrew MacRae) Distribution: alt Organization: Sun Microsystems, Mountain View Lines: 18 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit