ravi@mcnc.UUCP (Ravi Subrahmanyan) (03/06/87)
[] I just had a bizzarre experience with an ST, and I'm wondering it's happened to anyone else.. A member of the local ST users group asked me to demo the Magic Sac at a group meeting. I showed up with the Sac and some disks, and after an intro. during which people asked various questions, I plugged in the Sac and fired up MAGIC (rev 3.5). It came up in the finder, I clicked on an icon, and promptly fell flat on my face.. no kidding, we're talking major nose-squisher here. Not only did the MagicSac part fail utterly, the ST also freaked out in a big way. It subsequently would not recognize the existence of the disk drives, even if it was turned off and on, or reset. With a monochrome monitor, nothing would happen (the screen would stay dark). With a color monitor, it would display 20 bombs in lo-res mode, and then the bombs would rearrange themselves into various patterns in complete synchronization and dance around at their positions; rather like a Can-Can show, but *not* what I was looking for. After 15 minutes of messing around, we thought the ST had died, and went on with the show. Someone gave a demo of a slide show he'd put together with Degas- not the greatest resolution, but it was quite neat (he took pictures with a 35mm camera). In the middle of this, the ghost apprently returned to the machine, and it came back to life! It still woudln't work with the Sac, but everything else ran fine. The ST in question had a 1Meg upgrade done by Mind-mine computer systems (from somewhere in Oregon). My ST has the upgrade posted here eons ago. My question is: does anyone know if the Mind Mine upgrade is different in any way? The Sac runs fine on my machine, including using the extra memory. Does anyone know of any reason an memory upgrade could cause such problems? I doubt if it was just a loose chip somewhere because we've that ST has been carted around quite a bit, with no problems. Thanks in advance, -ravi ps: Re. my last posting about Neil's name's spelling: I took out the posters name etc., but forgot this: 8^) (it's what I look like when you turn your head sideways.. mashed potatoes, everyone.)
jpexg@mit-hermes.AI.MIT.EDU (John Purbrick) (03/06/87)
[An ST used to demo Magic Sac to an audience died spectacularly, then mostly recovered.] Maybe being taken from home and jostled around caused that famous chips- loose-in-their-sockets problem, which then cured itself, at least partially? There is a documented syndrome, too, known at MIT's Transportation Modelling Research Center (TMRC) as "The Psighton Effect", which causes equipment's likelihood of failure to increase in proportion to the number and importance of people who have it in their "Psight". --John Purbrick