follmer@hplabsb.UUCP (Stephen Follmer) (02/05/86)
I was wondering if anyone out there has some horror stories about the computer industry; crashed systems or lost backups. For example, I heard a story once about a guy who lost a month's worth of code due to some backup problem. This was about 6 in the morning, and apparantly, the guy caught the next plane to Nepal and joined a monastery. This is the best it could be pieced together since he hasn't been heard from since. He just drove to SFO international, put the ticket on his Master Card, and disappeared. Case closed. The guy was pretty upset, but on his way out the door, according to the guard, had a wild grin of calm and happiness, as though he'd won the last round with the machine through some Deux ex machina. Have you heard any similar stories?
yoda@ittatc.ATC.ITT.UUCP (Todd C. Williams [Jedi Knight]) (02/06/86)
> I was wondering if anyone out there has some horror stories about the > computer industry; crashed systems or lost backups. I have heard from a few people that Bill Joy wrote windows and a help facility and some other goodies into vi a long time ago, but then there was a head crash, ans Bill said, "forget it! I'm not going through the hell of rewriting all that again..." Has anybody heard that one? -Todd -- +------------------------------------------------------------------------------+ | Todd C. Williams | "Summer blonds | | ITT Defense Communications | revealing tan lines, | | Nutley, NJ | I'll make more moves than | | {decvax, et al.}!ittatc!dcdvaxb!tcw | ALLIED VAN LINES!" | | I love to receive e-mail from anyone!| --from: "I wanna be a lifeguard" | | | by BLOTTO | +------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
hopp@nbs-amrf.UUCP (02/08/86)
> I was wondering if anyone out there has some horror stories about the > computer industry; crashed systems or lost backups. For example, I heard > a story once about a guy who lost a month's worth of code due to some > backup problem. This was about 6 in the morning, and apparantly, the > guy caught the next plane to Nepal and joined a monastery. This is the > best it could be pieced together since he hasn't been heard from since. > He just drove to SFO international, put the ticket on his Master Card, > and disappeared. Case closed. The guy was pretty upset, but on his way > out the door, according to the guard, had a wild grin of calm and happiness, > as though he'd won the last round with the machine through some Deux > ex machina. > > Have you heard any similar stories? I heard a story about a baker in New York, NY who kept all his orders on a PC. That was his only record system. Well, his PC crashed and he didn't have a backup of the disk, and ended up loosing his record of orders for the whole year. He was frantically trying to find out who he was supposed to make wedding cakes for, calling up customers he could remember with questions like, "Are you getting married sometime?" He switched to a handwritten ledger system. -- Ted Hopp {seismo,umcp-cs}!nbs-amrf!hopp
ccrdave@deneb.UUCP (02/08/86)
> I was wondering if anyone out there has some horror stories about the > computer industry; crashed systems or lost backups. > I tried to e-mail this, but was bounced back. Six good ones, all true. 1) Somebody was fired from his job for a company in the bay area about ten years ago. He planted a software time bomb in the system to screw up all records for accounts receivable. When the right code was hit, all the records went away. The company didn't maintain backups. They couldn't get anybody to pay them money. They went bankrupt as a result. (It was in all the papers.) 2) A company I work with has an NCR Tower (AT to Sun sized micro) which they did software development on. Well, the system was on Version 7. They wanted to upgrade to System V. They did so, without backing up their system first. Crunch, crunch, crunch, the disk formats down. Whoosh, spanking clean disk, and six months down the drain. (I wasn't in the state at the time, you realize, and I was SURE they did backups.) 3) NCR had a novel design for heads, I think it was about fifteen years ago. Ceramic or something like that. Should have work, but the crash rate was bad. Anyway, one company got "lucky" and didn't have a head crash for two years. During those two years, they didn't back up ONCE! Two years worth of work down the tubes. (Got this fron an NCR service tech.) 4) When the local campus computer center got rid of their IBM 7044(?) back around 1970, they got a Burroughs 6500. This computer used disk drives instead of tapes. Everything was fine, for three months. Then, head crash. Of course, they hadn't done one backup. I heard this from a professor who lost three months of work. 5) I saw an operator munch the absolutely irretrievable data set of a poor woman from the Chem department. Two years worth of work, all shreded by a bad tape operator. 6) A department did all their backups on ONE tape. Two years, they used one tape. They screwed up, and wiped out the tape by re-initializing at the wrong density. Goodbye data sets. (Small VMS system, using backup. Backup allows independent save sets. The tape wasn't filled in two years.) Please send me a collection of what you get. {dual,lll-crg,ucbvax}!ucdavis!vega!ccrdave +-----------------------------------------------------------+ | "I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. | | Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched | | C-Beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate. All | | those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. | | Time to die." -- Roy Baty, Nexus6, N6MAA10816, Combat | +-----------------------------------------------------------+
earlw@pesnta.UUCP (Earl Wallace) (02/08/86)
An operator at one of our customers sites started getting errors from one of the CDC 300 megabyte removable disk drives, figuring that the drive might be bad, this person moved the disk pack to a another drive. Again, the disk couldn't read the pack without errors. The pack was moved to the last drive to see if that unit was working. Couldn't read the pack there either. It turned out that the first drive had a head crash and the disk pack surfaces were destroyed. All three drives experienced total head failures from this pack. I don't know what happened to the operator.
dewey@ttidcc.UUCP (William Dewey) (02/12/86)
In the early seventies, a service bureau had a computer located in the basement of a hotel in Washington, D.C.. Unfortunately, this hotel had a swimming pool on the roof. One fine spring day, they decided to re-fill the pool for the coming season. The service bureau wishes they had remembered to turn off the water. Something about a problem with water cascading down the ventilating shafts. Bill Dewey