Thread View: alt.folklore.computers
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Started by Brian.... Brian Randell
Mon, 15 Jan 1990 18:18
Hitting the Fan
Author: Brian.... Brian Randell
Date: Mon, 15 Jan 1990 18:18
Date: Mon, 15 Jan 1990 18:18
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I can vouch for the following story, which happened in (I would guess) about 1960 at the English Electric site at Whetstone, near Leicester, England, whilst I was employed there as an applications programmer (but was actually devoting all my time to compilers - or "automatic programming" as we then called it). English Electric Whetstone housed two major departments, the Mechanical Engineering Laboratory and the Atomic Power Division. Their first digital computer was a DEUCE - effectively a slightly re-engineered version of the original Pilot ACE, developed at the National Physical Laboratory by a team that was originally headed by Alan Turing. It was a physically quite large machine, built from valves (vacuum tubes) and using mercury delay lines for high speed storage (about four hundred 32-bit words) and a magnetic drum (8k words, I believe). It was air-cooled, with a large fan under the floor pulling in air from outside, which was then blown over the electronics and allowed to escape into the computer room. Many stories can be told about the DEUCE, but the most memorable incident at Whetstone was the following. The computer was run overnight by a small operating staff, who recorded their activities in a log book. I and my colleagues were in the habit of checking this log book each morning, and at one time noticed that over a period of a few days there were a gradually growing number of reports of the machine failing, and of a nasty smell - but none of us connected these facts, or succeeded in tracking their cause. Then one day the underfloor fan started becoming somewhat noisier, the smell increased dramatically, and soon afterwards the machine failed abruptly and spectacularly, with red lights all over the power distribution board. What had happened was there had been a break in a sewer pipe - a pipe being fed by all the toilets in the large multi-story building whose ground floor housed the computer room. The sewage gradually backed up, and then overflowed into the hole in the ground housing the fan, and then into the fan itself, so as to be distributed evenly and efficiently - for a while at least - around the whole computer! It took days to dry out and disinfect the machine - but it was returned to service, though the maintenance engineer never lived down the incident. Brian Randell Brian Randell, Computing Laboratory, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK EMAIL = Brian....@newcastle.ac.uk PHONE = +44 91 222 7923 FAX = +44 91 222 8232
Re: Hitting the Fan
Author: SL... Roger Ivie
Date: Thu, 18 Jan 1990 05:20
Date: Thu, 18 Jan 1990 05:20
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In article <1990Jan15....@newcastle.ac.uk>, Brian....@newcastle.ac.uk (Brian Randell) writes: > What had happened was there had been a break in a sewer pipe - a pipe > being fed by all the toilets in the large multi-story building whose > ground floor housed the computer room. The sewage gradually backed up, > and then overflowed into the hole in the ground housing the fan, and > then into the fan itself, so as to be distributed evenly and > efficiently - for a while at least - around the whole computer! My story isn't that dramatic. The university here used to have a Burroughs B6800. One day it went down in a fashion more severe than its normal yoyo mode. It turned out that a rat had crawled into the fan on one of the disk drives and had been spewed all over one of the disk packs. =============================================================================== Roger Ivie 35 S 300 W Logan, Ut. 84321 (801) 752-8633 ===============================================================================
Re: Hitting the Fan
Author: 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.
Re: Hitting the Fan
Author: wa... Wayne Hathaway
Date: Sat, 20 Jan 1990 23:56
Date: Sat, 20 Jan 1990 23:56
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Here's one my brother told me from when he was an IBM salesman back in the early 60's, when plugboard machines like the 407 Accounting Machine (exact name?) were all the rage. One day he gets this frantic phone call from a customer who reports that his 407 has blown up. Hmm, says my brother, you mean it's malfunctioning? No, says the customer, I mean it BLEW UP! Sure enough, when my brother arrives at the scene he finds little pieces of 407 all over the place. What the HELL??? Further investigation revealed that someone on the customer's staff had cleaned the type bars -- with gasoline! The heavy fumes had settled down into the large body cavity of the machine, and when power was turned back on ... And you thought you had problems when your PROGRAMS blew up! Wayne Hathaway Ultra Network Technologies domain: wa...@Ultra.COM 101 Daggett Drive Internet: ultra!wa...@Ames.ARC.NASA.GOV San Jose, CA 95134 uucp: ...!ames!ultra!wayne 408-922-0100
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