Text 4548, 148 rader
Skriven 2006-07-06 15:47:00 av Greg Sears
     Kommentar till en text av George Pope
Ärende: A Pope_pusher!
======================
Memories from an OLD techy!!!!

  Some computer-illiterate visitors were shown the CDC6400 at the Hebrew
University of Jerusalem.  One of them asked how does the machine do all
these wonderful things; their guide joked that it has a small man
inside.

  While he was speaking, a CDC technician (the late Rachmim Moreno, a
small man indeed) has just finished some routine maintenance and stepped
out of the machine.
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  A man was repairing a Russian EC-20 computer in Bangalore, India.  He
found an insulated wire soldered to a pin of a chip.  Looking for the
other end, he traced and he traced and he traced - 10 feet of wire, and
the other end was soldered to an adjacent chip!

  As it turned out, they needed a 10 ns delay between the two pins.
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  Back when core memory was in use one could "listen" to the memory with
a transistor radio.  A game among system programmers was to access
memory in such a manner as to produce recognizable tunes on the radio.

  Printers produce a buzzing with varying frequency depending on the
text being printed (this is because of the rate at which the hammers
strike the slugs in the print chain).  The same system programmers would
also compete to see who could print a job that played specific (and
known) tunes.
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  I recall being shown a PDP-8 in Uppsala University two years ago.  It
had a program that would perform memory accesses so as to generate noise
that could be picked up by an AM radio.  I was most amazed to hear a
polyphonic version of "The Entertainer" come from a PDP-8 :-)
----------------------------------------
  While a student at UCSD in the mid-60's I had the opportunity to work
many late nights in the computer punch card room on my physical
chemistry lab calculations.

  One late night when the computer operator was obviously bored, he
invited me into the sanctum sanatorium - the computer room.  The
computer was a CDC 3600 and had a curving CONSOLE about 8 feet long with
several hundred lights and switches (in those days, there was no such
thing as terminal input).  On the far wall was a bank of a dozen 1/2"
tape drives with vacuum column tape tension control.  He loaded up a
deck into the card reader (the only command input device) and started
it.  For the next 1/2 hour the computer PLAYED "The Stars and Stripes
Forever" and assorted Sousa marches, using the tones on the CONSOLE
(every light had its own tone) for the high low notes and the tape
drives for the low notes.

  At the same time, all the lights on the CONSOLE were blinking on and
off. Since I am now a full-time programmer, I finally appreciate the
work it must have taken a system level programmer to do that.  Talk
about primitive audio devices!
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  An office secretary was presented with her first PC and given large
amounts of instruction on how to operate it.

  Just before he left the C.E. he asked the secretary "What must you do
every Friday?" to which the secretary replied "Copy my data disks so I
don't lose any information."

  Satisfied, the C.E. departed.  One week later there was a phone call;
"I can't read my disks!" so the C.E. went back to the secretary.  Sure
enough the data disks were corrupt and unreadable.

"Have you got copies of these disks?"
"Yes"
"Can I see them please?"

  The secretary opened her desk drawer and removed several sheets of
paper. Curiously the C.E. examined them to see each was a perfect
photocopy of the data disks...
----------------------------------------
  A site had an HP3000 installation with a number of large 300Mb disk
disk drives.  One week, two of the drives crashed, so they called an
engineer.  The engineer examined the drives, and noticed a little pile
of sawdust on the floor by the side of them.

  Needless to say, there is no wood in the construction of these drives
and the floor was concrete.  The engineer repairs the drives and leaves,
sorely vexed.

  The same thing happens a couple of days later - same two drives crash,
engineer calls, sawdust, etc.  This pattern repeats until one day they
notice a maintenance man, who has a long plank of wood, walk into the
computer room, wedge the wood between the two drives (the gap between
them was juuust right!) and then proceed to saw the plank in half with
an enormous rip-saw.
----------------------------------------
  An irate customer couldn't save his records to disk.  The error
message he reported would only have appeared on a full disk, but he
claimed that he checked the space remaining and it was "okay."  Turns
out that the program he ran to check remaining space on a disk drive
returned the amount of free space, expressed in kbytes.  A full disk,
therefore, returned the string 0k (where 0=zero).

  Then there was the customer who complained because the new software
release wouldn't print.  This customer just knew he'd caught the
software company in a bug and he was demanding his money back.  My wife
stepped through the whole process, set up a duplicate system on her end
of the phone, and spent a fair amount of time duplicating his situation.
At last she determined that the only possible failure was that his
printer wasn't on line.

  "I've managed to duplicate your error message," she finally told him
after about three days of this.

  "Aha!  It is a bug, and you'll finally admit it!  Are you going to
refund my money?"

  "Well, we'll see," she said.  "First, look on your printer and see if
the little green light marked "on line" is lit."

  "No, it isn't.  What does it mean if it's not on line?"

  "Well, it's like the lights are on but nobody's home..."

  He never asked for his money back again.
----------------------------------------
  A huge travel agency in Florida (a major booker of Caribbean cruises
for blue-haired retired ladies) recently bought an IBM 3090 to handle
the reservation database.  When the deal was consummated, the proud new
owner asked IBM to install it in a big glass room right behind the
receptionist's area so all the customers could see the flashing lights
and spinning tape reels as they walked in - a testimony to the modernity
of the agency.  Good idea, except there are no blinking lights on a
3090.

  So the service manager offered to build some.  They hired a theatrical
designer to come up with a suitably futuristic "set", got curved glass
walls to minimize reflections, and installed the mainframe behind the
"real-looking" facade.  The customer declared that it was exactly what
he had in mind, regardless of what the actual computer looks like.

  Moral: The customer is always right.


Cheers,
.            o      _      _          _ From the
.   _o      /\_    _ \o   (@)\__/o   (@)      I C E-man
. _< \_    _>(@)  (@)/<_     \_| \    _|/' \/
.(@)>(@)  (@)         (@)    (@)     (@)'  _\o_ OUCH!

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