jhallen@wpi.wpi.edu (Joseph H Allen) (05/23/89)
In article <2936@buengc.BU.EDU> art@buengc.bu.edu (A. R. Thompson) writes: > >Ok, it's war story time. In 1971 I was a post-doc in the biology >department of a large university. Computers had just started to make >their way into the lab and several of us picked up on them (so much so we >The next day it was not so bright and clear. I walked into the lab and >there was the grad student frantically running back and forth between the ~~~~ ~~~~~~~ >front and back of the computer. He ran behind the machine and shouted, >"Is the DECtape turning?" >"No." I replied. >"Oh Shit." He said. >jumper the logic to the 100V ac. The smoke leaked out of everything. It More disaster stories... Our school had a can (project in a) which was going to fly on one of the shuttle missions. Towards the end of the project a bug needed to be fixed on the logic board. So the student goes and plugs in the soldering iron and touches the tip to one of the lands... POOOF!!! The iron was grounded and the power strip which it was plugged into was just returned from being repaired in the shop. The kid who fixed it: "Oh, I thought that the black wire was always ground... it always is in our EE labs..." The logic was replaced, but then the shuttle went poof... and that project is still on the ground. We discovered that coffee is quite conductive when someone knocked his cup over on top of the $5000 NTSC test pattern generator which had a cover with lots of little cooling holes in it. A secretary who is just getting her confidence with computers: "What's this '.' and '..' file in my directory (which was a subdirectory of the last lotus installation we had)? I don't need those! I'll just delete them..." bye-bye: # cd /; rm -rf * .* &