rcj@burl.UUCP (Curtis Jackson) (04/01/86)
A few years ago the University of Mississippi was upgrading its computing
facility (which then consisted of on one DEC-10 for staff, students, *and*
research!!) by adding two IBM 4341's (one for staff in day, research at
night, one for students and day research). There was no operator on duty
from Friday evening (5pm) 'til Sunday noon. When the operator came into
the computer room this particular Sunday, the temperature was hovering
above 100F. It seems that the Physical Plant people got a bit slack and
decided they didn't need to clean those nasty leaves off the air conditioning
input ducts.... The DEC never did boot again properly, the IBM had two
badly damaged disk drives but seemed unaffected otherwise -- one of the
few good things I've ever said about IBM!!
As for the +1:
I was working feverishly on my compiler for my compiler construction course,
so I came in Saturday night and the damned thing wouldn't work. It
transitioned to weird states, did all sorts of strange stuff. I spent
over 10 hours debugging the godawful thing on our powerful PDP-11/34 :-)
before I was finally reduced to the program:
main()
{
int i;
i=5;
printf("%d\n",i);
}
The answer printed was a six-digit number.... I finally called our system
administrator (it was early Sunday morning by this time) and he admitted
that he had been fooling with our V6/V7 halfbreed C compiler and...
I made him replace the C compiler with the old (correct) version before
I killed him.
Eric, if you're out there anywhere, I forgive you ;-)
--
The MAD Programmer -- 919-228-3313 (Cornet 291)
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