bob@imspw6.UUCP (Bob Burch) (02/06/89)
From Ted Holden, HTE: ---------------------- From Karla Jennings: >I am looking >for stories. Heard any tales second- or third-hand that sound possibly true but >that "happened to a friend of a friend" in different places at different times? >I'm also interested in stories that might have started in actual fact but that >have become so popular that they keep popping up. OK, you asked for it. Did you ever wonder about the uses to which modern computer science and database technology might get put to out there in the third world?... a buddy of mine swears this one is true: He claims to have been working as a contractor in Indonesia in the seventies when, having gotten rid of Suharto and the indigenous communists, the government of the islands decided to take the last major step and pull the nation into the 20'th century alltogether: they outlawed head-hunting. The next day, on a number of the islands, the people were walking around in utter dejection and dismay thinking "Oh my God, this is the end of civilization as we know it, now nobody can ever get married or have children any more and we're just all gonna f___ing die!!!!". Turned out that before a young man could get married or start a family, he had to go through initiation, which involved cutting off at least one human head and shrinking it according to tradition. The economies of the islands involved ground to a crunching halt; the legislature was forced to meet again and reconsider whether they'd gone too far in too short a period of time. The compromise solution which they worked out went roughly as follows: no NEW human heads were to be cut or shrunk, but census-takers took a total survey of all EXISTING shrunken heads, tatooing numbers on them and registering them according to owner, and compiling all of this valuable information into a computer database. Thereafter, when a young man was to undergo initiation, the government supplied him with printouts showing the whereabouts of all the shrunken heads in his region, and he STOLE one of them, at which point, the database was updated with him as owner of that head. My buddy claims to have designed that database. Ted Holden HT Enterprises -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Johnson!!! You're the idiot who bought these PS/2s and that System 36 over there!?!?!?!?!!? YOU'RE FIRED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! --------------------------------------------------------------------------
mrm@sceard.UUCP (M.R.Murphy) (02/07/89)
I seem to remember that it was possible to change a $400 DL11 serial interface into a $500 DL11-E serial interface with modem control by removing a jumper. At about $100.00/cm of wire not installed, that was interesting pricing.
haynes@ucscc.UCSC.EDU (Jim Haynes) (02/07/89)
In article <873@sceard.UUCP> mrm@sceard.UUCP (0040-M.R.Murphy) writes: >I seem to remember that it was possible to change a $400 DL11 serial interface >into a $500 DL11-E serial interface with modem control by removing a jumper. >At about $100.00/cm of wire not installed, that was interesting pricing. Yes, I made that conversion on a couple of them myself. The current-loop DL11, at least the ones delivered to us, were fully populated with chips, including the RS232 drivers and receivers. It was just a matter of which pins you used in the cable that plugged into a flat-cable connector on the board. If you ordered a DL11-E it came with a modem cable. If you ordered the current-loop model it came with about a foot of cable ending in that ghastly Mate-n-Lock connector they used with current loop terminals. Probably the modem cable was 25 feet long (?), so that's only $4 a foot for the extra wire :-( haynes@ucscc.ucsc.edu haynes@ucscc.bitnet ..ucbvax!ucscc!haynes "Any clod can have the facts, but having opinions is an Art." Charles McCabe, San Francisco Chronicle
asmoak@secola.Columbia.NCR.COM (Andy Smoak) (02/09/89)
One story that floats around here is about an engineer who went to a customer site to install software and perform some tests. S/he was installing a piece of software on an NCR PC when the message "Network Interrupt Vector Stolen" appeared on the screen. The customer, who was watching what s/he was doing very intently immediately said something like "I swear we didn't steal anything. We paid for the Network software." and proceeded "convince" the engineer they had paid for the software (Which s/he knew all along).
billp@scr1.UUCP (02/09/89)
In article <873@sceard.UUCP> mrm@sceard.UUCP (0040-M.R.Murphy) writes: >I seem to remember that it was possible to change a $400 DL11 serial interface >into a $500 DL11-E serial interface with modem control by removing a jumper. >At about $100.00/cm of wire not installed, that was interesting pricing. Yup, I used to do a lot of those service calls in the days before DZ11's -- I seem to remember you had to add the jumpers to enable the DL11's modem control lines. I also remenber being told that the drivers were not on all the early boards. As the chip prices dropped it made economic sense to only stock a generic M7800. A lot of CE's did the jumpers for customers on service contract for no charge on PM time. The real killer is the RP07 speed up -- change the interleave by reformatting after removing a jumper. -- Bill Pechter -- Home - 103 Governors Road, Lakewood, NJ 08701 (201)370-0709 Work -- Concurrent Computer Corp., 2 Crescent Pl, MS 172, Oceanport,NJ 07757 Phone -- (201)870-4780 Usenet . . . rutgers!pedsga!tsdiag!scr1!billp "Work didn't drive me to drink . . . I have my own car."
bradb@ai.toronto.edu (Brad Brown) (02/09/89)
I was told this story when we were talking about virtual memory in an operating systems course I took once. I don't know whether the story is authentic, but I think it's mostly true. It seems that wen IBM introduced virtual memory on its System 360 mainframes, not all their software people really understood how virtual memory really worked. Some of these people were responsible for building the symbol table manager for a new assembler. The team was told that virtual memory made your program think it could address 32 bits (4GB) of memory regardless of how much memory was really there, and that the memory manager would take care of everything. Rather than write complicated symbol table routines, the software team decided to take advantage of all this free memory by simply hashing the symbol name to a 31 bit value and store the symbol table entry at that address (with suitable protection to keep from overwriting the assembler, I suppose.) Well, it worked fine in testing. But the first time someone tried a real program with a few hundred symbols in it, every symbol hashed to a different page in VM, causing hundreds of page faults and filling the paging store with pages that each held only a few bytes of data. Needless to say, that part of the assembler was rewritten. I guess the software team got a lesson in virtual memory, too... (-: Brad Brown :-) bradb@ai.toronto.edu
sic@ritcsh.UUCP (Eric A. Neulight) (02/11/89)
I may as well add my favorite tid-bit to date...
A buddy of mine told me this story from when he worked for HP in tech support.
HP had just sold some company a complete desk top system to manage all their
various needs. This company had hired someone, presumably with good
references, to be their "computer operator". You would expect this guy to
have some modicum of familiarity with at least the basics.
Well....
My buddy gets passed the support call. The conversation went something
like this (I'm sure I am embelishing it a bit, but it is a true story):
Support: Hello?
Operator: [normal nicities]
Support: What seems to be the problem?
Operator: We just got this shiny brand new computer and it doesn't work!
Support: [Yup, already a wifto to deal with. Back to basics.]
Is it plugged in?
Operator: [huffy] Of course it's plugged in!!
Support: [persisting] Did you turn the power switch on?
Operator: [getting irritated] I'm not that dumb!
Support: ...is the printer plugged in, turned on, connected to computer?
Do you see anyhing on the screen?
Operator: [at end of rope] Look I know what I'm doing. The cursor just
blinks.
Support: Did you put the disk in the drive?
Operator: Yes I put the disk in the drive. And by the way I don't mind
telling you that the disks you gave us are a royal pain to
get out of that plastic jacket.
Supoort: [falls off his seat in hysteria].
==============================================================================
CLAIMER: Well -- I wrote it! Eric Alan Neulight
"Nothing is Impossible -- Just Impractical." Electrical Engineering
"For every Lock, there is a Key." Computer Science House
"INSANITY is just a state of mine." Rochester Institute of Technology
BITNET: EAN4762@RITVAX UUCP: ...!rutgers!rochester!rit!ritcsh!sic
==============================================================================kris@beep.UUCP (Port'naybl) (02/16/89)
[]
In August 1984, I was writing an assembler in Extended BASIC for my
TI 99/4A computer. People who work with 99/4As know that the area of
the console just in front of the cartridge port gets rather warm during
use by the power supply. One day I loaded my code from cassette(!) and
right after finishing the loading process, the computer died with a
god-awful falsetto SHRIEK!! The -5V power supply had gone South, and
taken a bunch of critical ICs on the CPU board with them!
After that I joked that my assembler must be getting rather
hairy since it caused my computer to commit suicide.
--
Port'naybl
scooter!beep!kris
for (; (all ? 1) && (1 ? all); ) { }raymond@leda (Raymond Man) (04/03/89)
My colleage was using this FORTRAN program and modified it by just adding a several line long DATA statement. And the program quit working right. There was no compilation error and the old version of the program was all right. All the guru in the computer centre could not help him. He was tearing his hair out for 3 weeks and about ready to quit when he finally had the system manager, an old lady from a different era, go through the manual page by page with him. At last, a footnote in small print cautioned what he should not but in fact did in his program: "DON'T USE 0 AS THE CONTINUATION CHARACTER FOR MULTI-LINE STATEMENT" Just call me `Man'. raymond@jupiter.ame.arizona.edu