🚀 go-pugleaf

A couple of years ago when we got a replacement for our aging VAX, we saw it
as a great opportunity to clean up our world and start afresh.  With that in
mind we had no doubt that Neat was a good name for the new machine (especially
considering the domain it and we were in at the time would have made the
hostname Neat.AI which has a nice ring to it).  We had no end of trouble with
that machine and comparatively little with its sister machine that was almost
identically configured.  When time came to buy a new machine to offload
Neat, we remembered the many schemes dreamt up to appease the gremlins; we
had considered things akin to the black candle scene described in a previous
posting, except our thoughts were in the direction of more pagan rituals.
It didn't get to that, but we were pretty convinced that the name we gave
the machine had jinxed it.

The new machine was a fast multiprocessor.  Because much of what we accomplish
here is done using smoke & mirrors, I had those two names in mind for future
machines.  It would perhaps have been appropriate to rename Neat to Smoke
and the new machine to Mirrors (considering its MP), but we kept Neat Neat
and the new box became Smoke.

A couple of months after we got the machine, it was baptized.

Y'see, smoke's backplane is really two backplanes (two separate busses) that
are indistinguishable by any physical layout or marking differences.

The guy here was putting a disk controller in it and wasn't clear on which
slot to plug it in, so he guessed.  Wrongly.

I'm told a nice plume of smoke emerged from the box before he managed to
turn it off.  One pin on the board connector had melted and was stuck in the
bus connector, and the disk controller board had a distinctly black look
about the internal traces near that connector.  But, nothing else was
damaged.  The computer and the disk controller both work fine, now talking
to each other in the right slot.

We were pleased that Smoke had passed its trial by fire.


... then there's the story of the FE who blew two disks because he measured
the AC line voltage (on the 110V plugs on the sequencer) from hot to ground
and got 110V, and therefore removed the 220V label on the box...