trdill@ihlpf.ATT.COM (Diller) (08/25/88)
When I was servicing computers I got a call one day from a woman saying that she could not read a tape in the tape drive at her site. I asked her to try another tape and it worked fine. I then asked her what she had done to the first one. she replied: "Well there were some crinkled ends on this tape so I did what I've seen done in the movies. I just reeled off a few feet and then cut the tape at that point." After I stopped laughing I told her what she had done. If you have any funny stories like this let me know, I'd be interested in them.
greim@sbsvax.UUCP (Michael Greim) (08/26/88)
In article <5856@ihlpf.ATT.COM>, trdill@ihlpf.ATT.COM (Diller) writes: > > If you have any funny stories like this let me know, I'd be > interested in them. Here is one. A friend of mine was working in a computer center, where they did work for companies. This particular day they were printing some forms for a firm (no put intended :-), when they noticed that they were soon going to run out of forms. So they called the company and told them about the problem. The company instantly sent a small van with some people to get the forms and bring them to the computer center. When they arrived, they started to unload the paper boxes, saying: "We wanted to make work easier for you and save you a lot of time. We have already prepared the paper for you." "Prepared? What do you mean by 'prepared'?" "Well, we removed this nasty perforation." -mg -- UUCP: ...!uunet!unido!sbsvax!greim | Michael T. Greim or greim@sbsvax.UUCP | Universitaet des Saarlandes CSNET: greim%sbsvax.uucp@Germany.CSnet| FB 10 - Informatik (Dept. of CS) ARPA: greim%sbsvax.uucp@uunet.UU.NET | Bau 36, Im Stadtwald 15 voice: +49 681 302 2434 | D-6600 Saarbruecken 11, West Germany # include <disclaimers/std.h>
smryan@garth.UUCP (Steven Ryan) (08/27/88)
>she replied: "Well there were some crinkled ends on this tape so >I did what I've seen done in the movies. I just reeled off a few >feet and then cut the tape at that point." > >After I stopped laughing I told her what she had done. Perhaps, I missed the joke, but I did that all the time. Of course I was careful to leave a leader before the load point.
bill@carpet.WLK.COM (Bill Kennedy) (08/27/88)
Since the forms subject came up I remember one that was more amusing
before people noticed it. I was in the data center for a large bank
in Rhode Island (they did a lot of smaller banks' DP work) when the
checking account statements for First National Bank of Attleboro were
printed and sent on the stationery for Fall River Trust Company...
--
Bill Kennedy Internet: bill@ssbn.WLK.COM
Usenet: { killer | att | rutgers | uunet!bigtex }!ssbn!billgateley@mips.csc.ti.com (John Gateley) (08/28/88)
In article <5856@ihlpf.ATT.COM> trdill@ihlpf.ATT.COM (Diller) writes: > >If you have any funny stories like this let me know, I'd be >interested in them. I was teaching the computer operator of this company how to do backups on a Unix machine: so I showed her the appropriate tar command. This used /dev/rmt0h as the destination. Then I went on my honeymoon, and while I was gone, she managed to type /dev/rmth0 one day. She couldn't figure out why her disk was full!!! John gateley@tilde.csc.ti.com
gerard@uwovax.uwo.ca (Gerard Stafleu) (08/29/88)
In article <5856@ihlpf.ATT.COM>, trdill@ihlpf.ATT.COM (Diller) writes: > > If you have any funny stories like this let me know, I'd be > interested in them. Some years ago I was in charge of the remote sensing image processing machine (mainly a PDP-11 with a fancy graphics terminal) of a Dutch university. People came in with tapes containing satellite pictures and such, and then did all kinds of things with the images. One day a user came to me complaining he could not read his tape. I went down with him to have a look at the situation. I at once had the feeling that something was wrong, but it took me a few moments to clue in: the tape was the wrong way around on the reel! As to this day I have not figured out how to get a tape onto a reel that way, at least not without trying reely (sorry :-) hard. In defense of Dutch computer.land I must say that the tape was not from the Netherlands. I won't tell you which country it came from, but they eat a lot of pizza's there.
nick@lfcs.ed.ac.uk (Nick Rothwell) (08/29/88)
>>If you have any funny stories like this let me know, I'd be >>interested in them. Well, I know one or two, most of which probably have fictional (or semi-fictional) origin. Like the secretary(*) who tried to correct typing mistakes on her word processor using liquid paper. Or the secretary(*) who did a daily backup of her floppy disks with a photocopier. Or the broken floppy disk drive. The repair man found a compact audio cassette rammed into the innards. Or the WP operators who kept key disks for their word processors attached to a filing cabinet with a magnet. Or the teacher who didn't like the QWERTY layout of the keys on the school computer, so he re-arranged the key tops into alphabetical order (despite repeated pleadings from his pupils that it wouldn't work). Or the WP user who kept getting read errors on floppies. After an examination of the machine, numerous questions, etc., the Tech Support guy asked him, "Do you have one of the floppies which is giving you trouble?" "Sure," he said, pulling a 5" floppy out of his back pocket and unfolding it. Nick. (*) Don't take these references to "secretaries" as sexist put-downs. It's just that secretaries are the unfortunate, untrained people most often given these machines and told to "start using" them. -- Nick Rothwell, Laboratory for Foundations of Computer Science, Edinburgh. nick@lfcs.ed.ac.uk <Atlantic Ocean>!mcvax!ukc!lfcs!nick ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ...while the builders of the cages sleep with bullets, bars and stone, they do not see your road to freedom that you build with flesh and bone.
tankus@hsi.UUCP (Ed Tankus) (08/29/88)
In article <614@sbsvax.UUCP>, greim@sbsvax.UUCP (Michael Greim) writes: > In article <5856@ihlpf.ATT.COM>, trdill@ihlpf.ATT.COM (Diller) writes: > > > > If you have any funny stories like this let me know, I'd be > > interested in them. > Here's another ... I sent a mag tape to client. The tape, as usual, sat around for some time until it was "discovered". Well, low and behold, the gentleman called up and was very irate that we should send him a tape wound backwards. Hmmm. Backwards? The gentleman, in very broken English, claimed that someone had wound the tape backwards and he had to re-spool the tape in order to read it. Further, he claimed that once this had been done, he could find no files, data, etc. on the tape. He demanded an immediate replacement. This whole thing was puzzling to me and the client support person handling the call. We shrugged our shoulders and shipped another tape. He called back within a day or two even MORE irate. Someone spooled the tape backwards again! Now, I have made a LOT of tapes, but I NEVER spooled one backwards, not even for fun! Suddenly, a thought crossed my mind (it does happen about once a year). I made a THIRD tape, delivered it to our client support rep, and had her ship it overnight. The gentleman called the next day. He was relieved that he could FINALLY read his tape and that someone competent had made his tape. To recap, I sent three tapes to this gentleman. All three had the very same software and were verified, by me, as having no errors and completely readable. What happened? The first two tapes sent were on Scotch Blackwatch brand. These tapes have a backing on them so one side appears shiney and the other dull. Because he had never seen a tape like this, he thought it had been spooled backwards! The third tape I sent was a Scotch 777 with NO backing. This is the one he thought was made by someone "competent". Sigh ... Cheers! -- Ed. Net : {uunet,noao,yale}!hsi!tankus Snail: Health Systems Int'l, 100 Broadway, New Haven, CT 06511 Bell : (203) 562-2101
littauer@amdahl.uts.amdahl.com (Tom Littauer) (08/31/88)
In article <5856@ihlpf.ATT.COM>, trdill@ihlpf.ATT.COM (Diller) writes: > > If you have any funny stories like this let me know, I'd be > interested in them. OK, my tape story. This one involves a careful user whose operators religiously cleaned the tape drives with lavish quantities of alcohol every morning, just to prevent trouble. Nevertheless, this user had terrible problems with intermittent tape errors. After much pain, we (vendor & customer) figured it out: the alcohol dissolved the binder on one particular brand of tape (name withheld because they fixed that problem about 10 years ago). See, the first tapes used that day would flake out just a little... No the vendor wasn't Amdahl (we don't do tapes). -- UUCP: littauer@amdahl.amdahl.com or: {sun,decwrl,hplabs,pyramid,ames,uunet}!amdahl!littauer DDD: (408) 737-5056 USPS: Amdahl Corp. M/S 337, 1250 E. Arques Av, Sunnyvale, CA 94086 I'll tell you when I'm giving you the party line. The rest of the time it's my very own ravings (accept no substitutes).
russell@imtec.co.uk (Russell Brown) (08/31/88)
Back in the days when applications on micros were written in BASIC on a 32K floppy based machine, a client started complaining about failures in their database. The application worked in batch mode and it seemed that when the batch had been completed the software was failing to update the master files correctly. Muggins here got landed with sorting out the problem and so I spent days entering records, doing the batch update and checking the results - Nothing went wrong. Finally in desperation I went out to the customer site and watched the operator enter a huge batch. The system checked that all was correct, the operator typed 'y' and the disks (single sided 8inch floppies!) started their normal clunking progress. The operator and I sat there watching the pretty little lights until another member of staff came in and asked her to find some information. 'Sure' she said, hit the break key and typed 'RUN', 'It's nice being able to do that' she smiled 'I'd have to wait hours otherwise.' Arrrrrrrrrrrrrgh ! Disclaimer: I didn't write the software and there wasn't any built in means to trap break anyway! The low tech solution was a rubber band underneath the BREAK key! -- --------------------------------------------------------------- | Russell Brown | Voice: 0733-66852 | | Imtec plc | EMAIL: russell@imtec.co.uk | | 7 Fitzwilliam Suite, | UUCP: | | Broadway Court, Peterborough, | ...mcvax!ukc!imtec!russell | | Britain, PE1 1SQ | | ---------------------------------------------------------------
kurt@tc.fluke.COM (Kurt Guntheroth) (08/31/88)
> Like the secretary(*) who tried to correct typing mistakes on her word > processor using liquid paper. OK guys, you think this is apocryphal? I've seen it happen. I was trying to get my thesis (in Computer Science) printed out in the arcane format acceptable to the University of Washington's Graduate School. It was the day before the acceptance deadline. All the letter quality printers were down but one old AJ printer-terminal. When I went to use this device, I discovered another (CSci) grad student in the closet containing the AJ, manually correcting his thesis by putting white-out over the incorrect words and retyping the characters with the printer in local mode. He had typed the original on the computer, but did not understand you could print a whole new copy. He spent three hours in there after I discovered him, so don't believe he was just making a few quick changes. To be fair, he was from Mainland China, where the undergrad Computer Science curriculum featured a total of 40 hours experience with any kind of computer.
william@pyr1.cs.ucl.ac.uk (08/31/88)
I was working for a small company in Cambridge, UK. The office manager was non-technical, but was in charge of component stores and had a good idea of the sorts of items that the company needed to order. We caught him out twice quite neatly by getting him to put in orders for some 8kx8 Write only memories, and some D-ROMS. These were caught by the person taking the orders. Best of all was the time when he successfully put in an order for some triple- sided disks, and the order was taken. The girl at the mail-order company phoned him back later in the day and spent several minutes telling him where to put his 3-sided disks. ... Bill ************************************************************************ Bill Witts, CS Dept. * Nel Mezzo del cammin di nostra vita UCL, London, Errrp * mi ritrovai per una selva oscura william@uk.ac.ucl.cs(UK) * che la diritta via era smarrita. william@cs.ucl.ac.uk(US) ***********************************************
leonard@bucket.UUCP (Leonard Erickson) (09/01/88)
In article <741@etive.ed.ac.uk> nick@lfcs.ed.ac.uk (Nick Rothwell) writes:
<>>If you have any funny stories like this let me know, I'd be
<>>interested in them.
<
<Well, I know one or two, most of which probably have fictional (or
<semi-fictional) origin.
<Or the WP operators who kept key disks for their word processors attached to
<a filing cabinet with a magnet.
This one ain't fictional! I used to be on very good terms with a Customer
Service Rep at a Radio Shack Computer Center (back when the Model 3 was
the latest thing!) One day she told me of the long running problem with a
user that she'd just solved that day...
Under TRSDOS 1.x files can have a limited-backups attribute. And they can also
be made non-copyable except by backup. The usual limitation is two backups.
This gentleman had kept coming in because his backups kept "going bad".
After going into *incredible* detail over the phone, she finally got it down
to this:
He: Ok, it is done backing up.
She: Ok, now what are you doing?
He: I put the original in the jackeet,
put the jacket in the sleeve in the manual.
She: Ok, what are you doing with the backup?
He: I put it up on the the file cabinet.
She: Up on the file cabinet?
He: Yes, I take the magnet and stick it up on the file cabinet...
She: ARRRRRRRRGGGGGGHHHHH!!!!!
Moral: It isn't always the secretaries. This guy was the BOSS....
--
Leonard Erickson ...!tektronix!reed!percival!bucket!leonard
CIS: [70465,203]
"I used to be a hacker. Now I'm a 'microcomputer specialist'.
You know... I'd rather be a hacker."aad@stpstn.UUCP (Anthony A. Datri) (09/01/88)
At CMU we had these sorts of things constantly. Users would jam a macintosh 3.5" disk into a PC, and would fold a PC 5.25" disk in half and stick it into a macintosh. Someone asked a fiend of mine how to "open this newfangled disk drive". It was the hard drive of an XT. Someone at Columbia was downloading 36 bit Twenex executables to his trash-80, and couldn't understand why they didn't work. By the way, what was wrong with cutting off the first few feet of a tape? Unless it was more than just a few feet, the person shouldn't have come close to the BOT marker, nicht wahr? -- @disclaimer(Any concepts or opinions above are entirely mine, not those of my employer, my GIGI, or my 11/34) beak is beak is not Anthony A. Datri,SysAdmin,StepstoneCorporation,stpstn!aad
haynes@ucscc.UCSC.EDU (99700000) (09/01/88)
And I suppose most of us have had the experience of buying a compiler. Then a few days after it arrives the guy from inventory control comes around saying "Where is this new compiler you got; I have to put an inventory tag on it?" haynes@ucscc.ucsc.edu haynes@ucscc.bitnet ..ucbvax!ucscc!haynes
asgard@cpro.UUCP (J.R. Stoner) (09/02/88)
From article <37600005@pyr1.cs.ucl.ac.uk>, by william@pyr1.cs.ucl.ac.uk: , I was working for a small company in Cambridge, UK. The office , manager was non-technical, but was in charge of component stores , and had a good idea of the sorts of items that the company needed to , order. We caught him out twice quite neatly by getting him to put , in orders for some 8kx8 Write only memories, and some D-ROMS. ^^^^^^ Caution. A really knowledgable source (the guy who designed the CompuPro PC-VIDEO card) told me once that the original true-blue CGA card for the PC used a Dynamic ROM for the character generator. Me? I am still unclear on the concept. , Bill Witts, CS Dept. * Nel Mezzo del cammin di nostra vita , UCL, London, Errrp * mi ritrovai per una selva oscura , william@uk.ac.ucl.cs(UK) * che la diritta via era smarrita. , william@cs.ucl.ac.uk(US) -- "To prevent from having to tell fools to RTFM don't let on you WTFM." J.R. (May the Farce Be With You) Stoner asgard@cpro.uucp asgard@fafner.uucp ...amdahl!pacbell!cpro!asgard
ssd@sugar.uu.net (Scott Denham) (09/02/88)
> In article <5856@ihlpf.ATT.COM>, trdill@ihlpf.ATT.COM (Diller) writes: > > > > If you have any funny stories like this let me know, I'd be > > interested in them. > -- Here's one that's a "repeating" funny story - I'm sure I wasn't the first victim and I know I wasn't the last. As an oil industry service firm, we recieve LOTS of tapes from remote sites where they are used to record real-time information. Due to pressure of time, the tapes didn't used to get rewound on the decks they were recorded on; a new one was popped on and the (removable) take-up hub was toted over to a rewinder and the tape spun back on to an empty reel. Naturally this sometimes got fouled up and we got the odd tape that was wound backwards (causing no end of chagrin to rookie operators trying to hang 'em on an autoloader!) Worse yet, the library/operations staff would sometimes "fix" the problem in such a way as to scramble things worse. Constant read errors were a good indicator that something was amiss. Unfortunately when we went to 1600 BPI, the symmertry of the pre/postamble codes meant you could read the tape backwards without error. Of course being PE, the data bore no resemblence whatsoever to what was SUPPOSED to be on the tape! I clearly remember viewing with dread this horribly garbled hex dump and trying to figure out how I was gonna explain that it was unreadable despite the crew's claim of 'read-after-write' verification.
sbc@sp7040.UUCP (Stephen Carroll) (09/03/88)
>>If you have any funny stories like this let me know, I'd be >>interested in them. The one I heard, which isn't necessarily true goes as follows: One day Person Jones picked up a prescription at the local pharmacy. After paying for the prescription, the person asked the pharmacist why the price seemed so high. Upon checking, the pharmacist found that he/she had charged for the brand name drug rather than the generic brand which was given Person Jones. To avoid the paperwork of fixing everything, the pharmacist told Person Jones that he/she would simply put a credit on the computer, so that the next time Person Jones needed a presciption, the amount would be adjusted by the credit. Well, the next time Person Jones visited the pharmacy, another pharmacist was working. This pharmacist quickly filled Person Jones' presciption and charged full price. After inquiring of the pharmacist about his previous credit, the pharmacist said that the computer showed a previous balance of $0.00 for Person Jones. Person Jones still questioned this, and after further searching, the pharmacist found a not taped to the side of his terminal which read: "We owe Person Jones $X."
linimon@killer.DALLAS.TX.US (Mark Linimon) (09/03/88)
In article <4675@saturn.ucsc.edu>, haynes@ucscc.UCSC.EDU (99700000) writes: > And I suppose most of us have had the experience of buying a compiler. > Then a few days after it arrives the guy from inventory control comes > around saying "Where is this new compiler you got; I have to put an > inventory tag on it?" Not computer related but even better are these: A friend had ordered a set of weights that were NBS-traceable. Receiving carefully added asset tags to them, utterly destroying their utility. The same company's incoming QA deparment once received a load of custom batteries (pc-board sized). Since they felt they had to do something to justify their salaries, they set out to measure them to make sure they were the right size. With metal calipers. :-) Certainly did not happend at the company _I_ work for. Mark Linimon Mizar uucp: {convex, killer, sun!texsun}!mizarvme!linimon
dlm@cuuxb.ATT.COM (Dennis L. Mumaugh) (09/03/88)
In article <5856@ihlpf.ATT.COM>, trdill@ihlpf.ATT.COM (Diller) writes: > > If you have any funny stories like this let me know, I'd be > interested in them. OK, my tape story. This happened to me. I was in a hurry to do a restore of some archived files. I put the tape on the DEC TU16 drive. In doing so I failed to lock the reel firmly and as I was in a hurry I didn't shut the door. [It works with the door open.] Shortly after I started the tape restore, the reel latch popped open, the reel fell to the floor and started rooling along the computer room floor. Meanwhile, the vacuum column was still working and fulling tape off the reel and the drive is reading the tape. And, the reel is being pulled along the floor resulting in it unrolling, etc. And of course four people are running around trying to catch the tape, turn-off the drive and abort the command. After that the tape drive instructions said: 1). Place reel on drive. 2). Tighten reel lock 3). Press load 4). Tighten reel lock 5). Press on-line 6). Tighten reel lock ... -- =Dennis L. Mumaugh Lisle, IL ...!{att,lll-crg}!cuuxb!dlm OR cuuxb!dlm@arpa.att.com
larry@kitty.UUCP (Larry Lippman) (09/04/88)
> In article <5856@ihlpf.ATT.COM>, trdill@ihlpf.ATT.COM (Diller) writes: > > If you have any funny stories like this let me know, I'd be > > interested in them. About ten years ago, my organization was located within a large industrial park. One day I left the building with my briefcase and a large printout (300 or so pages). Like a dummy, I set the printout on top of the car while I unlocked the door. Needless to say, a big gust of wind came along and blew the printout across several cars. There ain't no way to refold a computer printout in the wind - what a mess! What really _hurt_ was that several people from an adjacent building were so busy watching me and laughing their balls off, that no one even offered to help. <> Larry Lippman @ Recognition Research Corp., Clarence, New York <> UUCP: {allegra|ames|boulder|decvax|rutgers|watmath}!sunybcs!kitty!larry <> VOICE: 716/688-1231 {att|hplabs|mtune|utzoo|uunet}!/ <> FAX: 716/741-9635 {G1,G2,G3 modes} "Have you hugged your cat today?"
bobmon@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu (RAMontante) (09/04/88)
Back when I was new to computers and none of my coworkers used them at all, I one day offered Joe some old printout for his kids to draw on. There was a good two inches of it, z-folded, and it seemed a shame to just throw away part of a tree.... Joe was delighted with the idea, and took it home happily. Next morning he wasn't nearly so happy. It seems that holding one end of the paper, and running at top speed ALL through the house, was a lot more fun than drawing on it. -- -- bob,mon (bobmon@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu) -- "Aristotle was not Belgian..." - Wanda
hiebeler@pawl19.pawl.rpi.edu (David Hiebeler) (09/04/88)
There was one pretty good story posted about things happening to floppy disks, such as sticking them up on a cabinet using magnets... Anyways, one day a friend of mine was coming over to let me borrow a disk of his. When he showed up, he acted kind of funny; when I asked him why, he said "I kind of dropped the disk while I was crossing a stream, and it floated away before I could grab it." How many people has _this_ happened to? :-) -Dave Hiebeler Internet: hiebeler@cs.rpi.edu Bitnet: hiebeler@rpitsmts
ruffwork@orstcs.CS.ORST.EDU (Ritchey Ruff) (09/04/88)
Well, here at OSU the undergrad Macintosh lab is always good for a few laughs...like the one time someone came to me and asked if there was any way to get data off of a disk that the mac refused to read (it was the persons term project). I ask "what does the mac do?" "It spits it back out." Hmmm, never seen THAT one before. I take the disk the media would not even begin to turn! "*WHAT* did you do to this disk?" "I left it in my pocket and it went through the washer and drier..." oh, just use your backup. It was in the other pocket... --ritchey ruff ruffwork@cs.orst.edu
mark@hubcap.UUCP (Mark Smotherman) (09/05/88)
Remember stories about grade schoolers telling the teacher that they couldn't hand in their homework because "the dog ate it"? A true story from our high-tech age: A college sophomore once told me he couldn't turn in his assignment because his dog had chewed up his floppy disk. Thereupon he produced a suitably gnawed floppy. -- Mark Smotherman, Comp. Sci. Dept., Clemson University, Clemson, SC 29634 INTERNET: mark@hubcap.clemson.edu UUCP: gatech!hubcap!mark
u-dmfloy%sunset.utah.edu@utah-cs.UUCP (Daniel M Floyd) (09/06/88)
In article <6308@orstcs.CS.ORST.EDU> ruffwork@CS.ORST.EDU (Ritchey Ruff) writes: >[...The mac..] "... spits it [the disk] back out." ... >"I left it in my pocket and it went through the washer and drier..." I had something similar happen, but I found a way to recover the data! A co-worker and I were moving some equipment in a laboratory. This lab was equiped with a deluge system due to the nature of the lab. Suddenly, it started to rain *inside*. We got out quickly. For about 15-20 minutes, water was everywhere inside. Apparently, a contractor had just dug up a remote control pneumatic line for the system. The water came up to the top of my boots (the part that covers my toes, about 2-3 inches). Some very expensive equipment was left on (cry). Worse, *irreplacable* data was on disks laying on the table (mass histerical tears, uncontrolable fits of agony). A couple of million dollars worth of equipment damaged. We hadn't even had a chance to copy the data from the original (now soaked) floppy to the (now soaked too) backup. These were destructive tests. We couldn't just do it again. I suppose we could take a couple years to rebuild the sample and break it. Anyway, this was a horror to all of us. After getting repairs underway, and getting water pumped out, moped up ... I set about trying to get the data. The disk would not turn. I tried everything I could. Finally, resolved that we had lost it, and I couldn't hurt it worse, I opened the disk jacket with an exacto along the edge. I carefully removed the disk. After two days it was still damp. No wonder it wouldn't turn. I took some non-static fiberglass stuff and padded it dry. I let it dry completely till the next day. I gingerly slipped the black magnetic media disk into the drive. I aligned it with bated breath and gently pressed the door closed. Then, to my amazement, when I called for a directory, I got one! I copied everything off that disk ... *three* times. I found that there were a couple of bytes that got zapped. The checksum, was off. But the data was useable! I extrapolated (guessed) at the missing bytes which weren't significant to the test anyway. This may not be funny, but I thought some of you out there would be interested.
matthew@sunpix.UUCP ( Sun NCAA) (09/06/88)
I've heard a number of stories of persons attaching thier diskettes to
filing cabinets with magnets, Well I've also heard of a service tech who
was trying to fix a broken disk drive, but couldn't find anything wrong with.
While getting it ready to ship to the manufacturer he spotted something
yellow inside the drive. Upon closer examination, he found a 1" x 1-1/2"
post-it note stuck on the drives read/write head. Upon removing it the drive
worked fine. When the owner came into the shop to pickup the drive the tech
found out that the owner was using post-it notes to label his disks. Of course
the tech recommended something a little more permanent.
--
Matthew Lee Stier (919) 469-8300|
Sun Microsystems --- RTP, NC 27560| "Wisconsin Escapee"
uucp: {sun, rti}!sunpix!matthew |rickers@drexel.UUCP (Rick Wargo) (09/07/88)
In article <1123@imagine.PAWL.RPI.EDU> hiebeler@cs.rpi.edu (Dave Hiebeler) writes: > There was one pretty good story posted about things happening to floppy >disks, such as sticking them up on a cabinet using magnets... When I first started out using computers in high school, I had carried around 3 5 1/4" Apple ][ floppies that had all of the programs I had ever written. One day while jumping out of a car with books in hand and floppies in books, running to escape the rain, the books slid out of my hand and the floppies went right into a big puddle of muddy water. I rushed into the house, washed the floppies in the sink and put a hair drier to them to dry them off. The next day, I plugged the floppies in the computer and they still worked! To this day I still have the floppies, although I do not use them often at all ;-). The first floppy even has the sides slit such that I can remove the disk. And the disks are still readable. Rickers ..!drexel!rickers
mills@hathi.eng.ohio-state.edu (Christopher Mills) (09/07/88)
A few favorites from my days as a consultant in the OSU Mac Labs: People who put the disk label over the little metal sliding part on the 3.5" floppies. People who either (a) don't realize that they can pick the mouse up when they run out of table, or (b) don't have the foggiest idea how to use it and flip it over and move the ball with their fingers. Of course, my least favorite is explaining why it is a bad thing to select your entire document and replace it with the letter "h", which is suprisingly easy to do on a Mac... -=- _________________________________________________________________________ | Christopher Mills | "If you see someone without a smile, | | mills@baloo.eng.ohio-state.edu | give them mine - I'm not using it." | ====== My thoughts are not my own--I'm posessed by mailer daemons. ======
greim@sbsvax.UUCP (Michael Greim) (09/07/88)
Hello,
here are some computer follies published some time ago.
From Jack Campin (jack@cs.glasgow.ac.uk) on Nov 27 1987
<I have had the doubtful privilege of looking after an ICL 3930 over the last
<couple of years. This machine has a prodigious number of ways to reboot; most
<of them are reasonably documented, but one - I think the one you use when you
<want to save an image of a set of virtual machines to disk to speed up future
<routine reloads - comes up with a prompt:
<ENTER DATE AND TIME
<and leaves you guessing. It only accepts ONE date format, and the manuals
<nowhere say what it is. I first got the answer on Monday morning on the first
<of January 1986 and it's this:
<TUE.1986/01/07__08.32
<Intuitive, eh? - I think it took about four phone calls before I found someone
<at ICL who knew what it ought to be.
From Tim Olson (tim@amdcad.UUCP) on Dec 1 1987
<Back to the original discussion, here is an example Alan Kay gave in a
<talk at Stanford about 2 years ago (paraphrased by me and my potentially
<faulty memory!):
<
<To test out new user interfaces, Xerox would videotape novice users
<working with the system. In one particular instance, one person was to
<perform a task that required a DoIt command at the end (from a pull-down
<menu). He kept repeating the cycle of performing everything up to the
<DoIt, pulling down the menu, going to the DoIt entry in the menu,
<muttering something under his breath, then quitting out of the menu.
<
<Upon review of the tape, the researchers discovered that the person was
<muttering "DOLT!.. I'm not a dolt". They then realized that DoIt (with
<an uppercase I) *did* look like the word "dolt" in the sans-serif font
<they had for the system. They later changed it to "doit" (lowercase
<'i').
From Clif Flynt (clif@.chinet.UUCP) 15 Dec 1987 :
<In article <1943@ncr-sd.SanDiego.NCR.COM> matt@ncr-sd.SanDiego.NCR.COM (Matt Costello) writes:
<>The real problems in interface design generally occur because of
<>unstated assumptions. We had a hilarious incident occur here
<>recently...
<>
<> Imagine our suprise when a worried secretary called
<>to say that she had been able to fit only 5 of the disks into the
<>disk drive.
<>
<
< A similar incident happened to a friend, diagnosing a floppy disk read
<problem over the phone.
< "Have you cleaned the disk?" He inquired, thinking that the heads might
<be dirty.
< "I'll try it and call you back", said the person at the other end, and
<about 10 minutes later called back to inform my friend. "I took the disk
<out of that black wrapper, and you were right, it was covered with brown
<dusty stuff. I cleaned that all off, but it still doesn't work."
<
<
< There is also the tale of the DP manager who wanted to make sure that
<nobody would overwrite the data on his tapes. He filled the slots where
<the write-enable rings would go with epoxy, so that no-one could put
<a write enable ring in. He didn't realize that ANYTHING in that slot will
<enable the tape for writing.
<
< Another friend of mine tells the tale of a system where people
<could log in OK as long as they sat in front of the terminal.
<If they stood in front, then their password was rejected.
< It finally turned out that two key-caps on the keyboard had been swapped.
<When people sat, they put their fingers on the 'home row' and typed,
<but standing, they typed with two fingers, and looked at the key-caps to
<see which keys to press.
Sorry, I missed the above cited article,
-mg
--
UUCP: ...!uunet!unido!sbsvax!greim | Michael T. Greim
or greim@sbsvax.UUCP | Universitaet des Saarlandes
CSNET: greim%sbsvax.uucp@Germany.CSnet| FB 10 - Informatik (Dept. of CS)
ARPA: greim%sbsvax.uucp@uunet.UU.NET | Bau 36, Im Stadtwald 15
voice: +49 681 302 2434 | D-6600 Saarbruecken 11, West Germany
# include <disclaimers/std.h>daven@weathertop.prime.com (09/08/88)
YAFS (Yet another floppy story)
>[Storys of floppys being mutilated]
That reminds me of a friend that was working on a large project for
undergrad. The network server's disk that had the project on it
died forever. The good news was that she had a backup on a floppy.
The bad news was that the floppy was in her backpack and had been
bent to a right angle under some books. I carefully bent the floppy
back into shape, and copied the project intact off of the disk klunking
around in the drive.
We both got a disk holder after that experience...
--
tel: (508) 879-2960 X3987 Dave Nedde
Usenet: primerd!weathertop.prime.com!daven Prime Computer, 10C-17
Internet: daven@weathertop.prime.com 500 Old Connecticut Path
Framingham, MA 01701
starbrd@ucscb.UCSC.EDU (Steven W.) (09/08/88)
I once was using a distributed system of three unix computers that used a partialy bad disk. My files were partly stored in the bad part of the disk, so a few minutes after I logged on, all three would crash! Steven Widom ARPANET: starbrd@ucscb.ucsc.edu UUCP: ...ucbvax!ucscc.ucsc.edu!ucscb!starbrd
patrick@crcmar.uucp (Andrew Patrick) (09/08/88)
I occasionally write software for undergraduate lab classes. To see
how well the students like the software (and to look for bugs), I
sometimes peek over their shoulders during the labs. One student read
the first instruction page and then paused for a very long time, so I
asked him what the problem was. He said "It says press any key to
continue." I said "So, what's the problem?" He said "I can't find
the 'any' key!"
The software now says "Press <RETURN> to continue."
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Andrew Patrick, Ph.D. Communications Research Center, Ottawa, CANADA
SmartMail: patrick@crcmar.uucp UUCP: ...utzoo!bnr-vpa!bnr-rsc!crcmar!patrick
BITNET: patrick%crcmar@UTORGPU ARPA: dgbt@ncs-dre.arpa
"Might as well be frank, monsieur. It would take a miracle to
get you out of Casablanca."
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~shane@chianti.cc.umich.edu (Shane Looker) (09/08/88)
In article <6308@orstcs.CS.ORST.EDU> ruffwork@CS.ORST.EDU (Ritchey Ruff) writes: >do to this disk?" "I left it in my pocket and it went through >the washer and drier..." oh, just use your backup. It was in >the other pocket... > >--ritchey ruff ruffwork@cs.orst.edu Good Grief! We had the same problem! The story (as reported by a friend who was there) goes like: User comes in. Says that his roommate is a neatness freak and washed his clothes with the floppy in the pocket. Can the consultants get it back? Consultant says sure. Shoves the disk into external drive. Disk makes very strange grinding sound. They remove the disk from the the drive and open the disk shutter. Inside is a piece of Bounce. Second Story: (We have many of them.) (This and the next story are from another friend who was consulting when they occured.) [As some background, we have station assignment cards which are about the same width as a floppy but at least an inch longer.] User comes in and says that he put his disk into the Mac but it isn't working. My friend goes out and checks. The user has managed to force the station card all the way into the disk drive! The card is deeper than the drive can take... Third Story: Same friend as above, different site. A user had a bottle of something like Liquid Paper on the top of the Mac. The bottle had fallen off the Mac and poured onto the disk. The user put the disk back into the machine (my friend things he wanted to get the data off before ti got ruined) where it stuck. My friend removed the disk using a paper clip and opened the shutter. The whole disk was covered with white liquid paper... We've probably got a couple hundred funny things in one of our conferences here. More at another time. Shane Looker Looker@um.cc.umich.edu
tgk@beach.cis.ufl.edu (Tom Krajna) (09/09/88)
One of the students in an intro CIS class here at UF said her dad had bought
her an IBM PC to help her with classes. When the professor told her that
all the programming would be done on a VAX, not PC's, she asked, "Would it
help if I got one of those?"
--
Tom Krajna UUCP: ...ihnp4!codas!uflorida!beach.cis.ufl.edu!tgk
University of Florida Internet: tgk@beach.cis.ufl.edu CIS: 73267,1652
"What's this?" "That's your *hand*, Buckaroo."shawnm@sco.COM (Shawn McMurdo) (09/09/88)
In article <27800001@weathertop> daven@weathertop.prime.com writes: > >YAFS (Yet another floppy story) > >>[Storys of floppys being mutilated] > in 1981 (ok so i was in high school), a couple of friends and i attempted to see how much we could mutilate a disk and still get our cbm pet computer to read it. we proceeded to crumple, mangle, fling about, and variously damage the disk. we then ripped it out of its cover, threw it on the floor, and stomped on it with dirt encrusted tennis shoes, creating some rather nice shoe prints on what was left of the floppy. we took the top off the disk drive, dropped in the floppy, and with a little bit of alignment by hand, wallah, no data lost! takes a licking and keeps on spinning! shawn -- funjaz (uhatnevna) beke es szerelem (crnpr naq ybir) egeszsegedre! (purref!) # solely the opinions of an unlicensed pandimensional fruitbat named simon # !{ucbvax!ucscc || sun || decvax!microsoft || uunet}!sco!shawnm
peter@ficc.uu.net (Peter da Silva) (09/09/88)
In article <1123@imagine.PAWL.RPI.EDU>, hiebeler@pawl19.pawl.rpi.edu (David Hiebeler) writes: > "I kind of dropped the disk while I was crossing a stream, and > it floated away before I could grab it." > How many people has _this_ happened to? :-) Well, at a previous job one of the guys slipped and fell coming up the front steps while crrying an armful of disk boxes, and dropped about 20 disks in the rain. We opened them up and dried them out and sealed them up again, and were actually able to read most of them. -- Peter da Silva `-_-' Ferranti International Controls Corporation. "Have you hugged U your wolf today?" peter@ficc.uu.net
ruby@ssc-vax.UUCP (Ruby Hidano) (09/09/88)
Here's another one about a compiler purchase... Seems our facilities department caught wind of our recent aquisition of an Ada compiler. One day soon thereafter a facilities representative paid a visit to the systems administrator and politely inquired "How many square feet will your new compiler require?"
vanpelt@unisv.UUCP (Mike Van Pelt) (09/09/88)
One of my favorites is the story of the CS 101 student who kept pestering a graduate student for help on a FORTRAN program with numerous syntax errors. Finally the graduate student told him that all he needed to do was use FORTRAN's automatic correction feature: Just place a "C" in column 1, and the compiler would automatically correct the statement! Sure enough, after several passes, the hapless CS 101 student got a clean compile. The program didn't do a whole lot, of course. -- Mike Van Pelt Unisys, Silicon Valley vanpelt@unisv.UUCP Bring back UNIVAC! ...uunet!ubvax!unisv!vanpelt
ewhac@well.UUCP (Leo 'Bols Ewhac' Schwab) (09/10/88)
In article <1205@scolex> shawnm@sco.COM (Shawn McMurdo) writes: >in 1981 (ok so i was in high school), a couple of friends and i >attempted to see how much we could mutilate a disk and still get >our cbm pet computer to read it. [ ... ] This is probably an Urban Legend, especially considering the original source, but here goes. A friend of mine also decided to test the limits of floppy abuse, except they were reading it on an Apple ][. They spilled coffee on it. They put a crease in it, and removed it. They walked on it. On their way to L.A., they passed it through the X-Ray machine six times or so. They sat on it. Ultimately, they took it to a waiting Disk ][ drive, and it booted. Me? My 5-1/4" floppies went bad if I just looked at them cross-eyed. _-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_ Leo L. Schwab -- The Guy in The Cape INET: well!ewhac@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU \_ -_ Recumbent Bikes: UUCP: pacbell > !{well,unicom}!ewhac O----^o The Only Way To Fly. hplabs / (pronounced "AE-wack") "Work FOR? I don't work FOR anybody! I'm just having fun." -- The Doctor
dan@maccs.McMaster.CA (Dan Trottier) (09/10/88)
More follies: I use to work as an undergraduate student assistant in the computer labs at this university. It seems that every year there is one student that comes for help because his terminal is not working properly. It seems that everything is fine until the system asks him for a password and then it won't echo anything he types! :-) -- Dan Trottier dan@maccs.McMaster.CA Dept of Computer Science ...!uunet!utai!utgpu!maccs!dan McMaster University (416) 525-9140 x3444
sauer@auschs.UUCP (Charlie Sauer) (09/11/88)
Since the discussion seems almost stuck in stories of abuse of removable media,
I'll offer a diversion with recollection of one (two) of my more embarassing
and trying experiences.
I had a pot of Swedish ivy sitting on top of my primary machine, a floor
standing RT. When I come in in the morning, I dump any water left in my
tea pot in the ivy pot (and make my tea with fresh water, of course).
One morning the tea pot was nearly full, but I went ahead with my usual ritual,
not thinking about the consequences. I was typing away and started getting
error messages I had never seen before, about memory failures and so forth.
After a kernel panic I powered off and on to try to run some diagnostics,
but the machine wouldn't come up at all. After a couple of calls to service
people, I realized what had happened.
The side covers join in the middle of the top of the machine. Water had
entered that joint and spilled all the way down inside. The disks are
at the top and they stayed dry. The motherboard is vertical, so it didn't
get very wet. The power supply is sufficiently well encased that it didn't
get wet inside. But all of the I/O cards, memory cards and the processor
card had standing water on them!
I wiped up the water as well as I could with paper towels, pulled all the
cards and let them stand vertically to drain, and waited an hour or so. I
put everything back together and had returned to normal operation by noon.
A month or so later I made the same mistake, but caught most of the water
before it got inside, so there was no service interruption. The ivy now
has a separate stand and only tape cartridges and diskettes get left on
top of the machine...
--
Charlie Sauer IBM AES/ESD, D75/802 uucp: cs.utexas.edu!ibmaus!sauer
11400 Burnet Road csnet: ibmaus!sauer@CS.UTEXAS.EDU
Austin, Texas 78758 aesnet: sauer@auschs
(512) 823-3692 vnet: SAUER at AUSVM6spolsky-avram@CS.YALE.EDU (Joel Spolsky) (09/11/88)
In article <927@crcmar.uucp> patrick@crcmar.UUCP (Andrew Patrick) writes: | One student read | the first instruction page and then paused for a very long time, so I | asked him what the problem was. He said "It says press any key to | continue." I said "So, what's the problem?" He said "I can't find | the 'any' key!" | | The software now says "Press <RETURN> to continue." Gee, my computer doesn't have a <RETURN> key ;-) The four stages in computer literacy: novice - doesn't realize that RETURN, Enter, and <-' all mean the same thing literate - knows that Return = Enter and regularly tells novices to hit "return" when the keyboard is plainly marked "Enter" hopelessly overqualified - gets confused between line feeds, carriage returns, ^J, enter, ctrl-Enter, meta-shift-ctrl-Enter, ... wizard - understands why sometimes when you hook up a PC to a mainframe you get double-spaced output and knows instinctively what to do about it (wizards probably also know how to get the Symbolics terminal emulator to clear on backspace instead of overprinting, but that's a different issue). Joel Spolsky bitnet: spolsky@yalecs uucp: ...!yale!spolsky Yale University arpa: spolsky@yale.edu voicenet: 203-436-1483 You can't expect to wield supreme executive power just 'cause some watery tart threw a sword at you!!
brianm@sco.COM (Brian Moffet) (09/12/88)
Friend of mine talked to a man once who had done the following
command on a Xenix machine:
# cat /etc/wtmp > /dev/hd00
followed by several syncs and a reboot. He wondered why
his computer wouldn't boot after that. I told my friend that
the man should take his hard disk and hit it with a sledge hammer
to finish the job with hardware that he started with software. :-)
brian
--
'Evil Geniuses for a Better Tommorrow!'
My opinions do not in any way reflect those of my employer or my fish.
Brian Moffet brianm@sco.com {ucscc,uunet,decvax!microsof}!sco!brianm
-or- (home machine, an amiga) {ucscc,uunet,decvax!microsof}!sco!orac!brianseanf@sco.COM (Sean Fagan) (09/12/88)
I don't know if this one exactly fits in here, but it's funny anyway (I think it is). One student at Cal State Northridge, after taking a class in Pascal (and finding out about local variables, parameters, and their place on the stack) then took a class in FORTRAN. One of the programs he ended up writing had a routine that squared up it's parameter (I don't know why they just didn't use inline code); he figured that, since the parameter was on the stack, and local variables would also be on the stack, he would save time by doing something like: 'INTEGER SQUARE(x); x=x*x; RETURN x' (formatted properly, of course). Then, in his program, he printed out something like 'SQUARE(5)'. Unfortunately, he was on a CDC Cyber, which doesn't have a stack, and very seriously believes that if you modify a parameter to a function, that's what you want to do. He ended up asking the student assistant on duty (me) why his program was printing: 'PRINT *,5,SQUARE(5)' as '25 25' (or something like that)... Well, I thought it was funny. -- Sean Eric Fagan | "Joy is in the ears that hear, not in the mouth that speaks" seanf@sco.UUCP | -- Saltheart Foamfollower (S. R. Donaldson) (408) 458-1422 | Any opinions expressed are my own, not my employers'.
djbrady@westfort.UUCP (Docile Jim_Brady) (09/12/88)
Well, this is *NOT* an urban legend; I still have the disks to prove it! I have a bad habit of at times eating and modeming concurrently. I happened to be eating some fried chicken and inadvertently picked up a disk at the reading ellipse. I knew that I got grease on the front side, but was not aware that I had deposited a small piece of batter on the back side. The drive made the darndest noise when that disk was being read. I eventually found and removed the piece of batter. Oddly, I was able to reformatt the "battred" disk, but was not able to make the original format on the disk that had only the grease. BTW, I was put on Teletrial locally for that faux pas.
ssd@sugar.uu.net (Scott Denham) (09/12/88)
In article <1434@ficc.uu.net>, peter@ficc.uu.net (Peter da Silva) writes: > Well, at a previous job one of the guys slipped and fell coming up the front > steps while crrying an armful of disk boxes, and dropped about 20 disks in > the rain. We opened them up and dried them out and sealed them up again, and > were actually able to read most of them. > -- > Peter da Silva `-_-' Ferranti International Controls Corporation. As a n oilfield service company that acquires massive amounts of data on magnetic tapes from nasty little boats floating around in nasty sorts of places, we've seen a lot of "dampened" data. The two worst cases I have had to deal with were a whole case of recorded tapes that fell overboard somewhere off Alaska and were amazingly recovered some weeks later by some local fishermen. They had apparently been caught in a net and spent SEVERAL days in a hold full of fish!! And no hazardous duty pay for having to clean 'em, either!!! The second was a tape from a land crew that was discovered to have a .22 slug embedded about halfway down the reel!. After a quick clean and splice job, we recovered all but about 2% of the data! Scott Denham Western Atlas International
baron@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu (Baron Fujimoto) (09/12/88)
In article <1417@maccs.McMaster.CA> dan@maccs.UUCP (Dan Trottier) writes: >More follies: > I use to work as an undergraduate student assistant in the >computer labs at this university. It seems that every year there is >one student that comes for help because his terminal is not working >properly. > It seems that everything is fine until the system asks him >for a password and then it won't echo anything he types! :-) I am currently working as an undergraduate student assistant in a computer terminal room here at UH, and this is fairly common at the start of semsters. Even funnier though, is when they come to you complaining that their terminal is not working at all... so you go over to investigate and then _turn on_ the terminal for them. We have also seennew users try an insert more than one, or an improperly oriented 3.5" disk into a macintosh drive... -- INTERNET: baron@uuccux.uucc.hawaii.edu | BITNET: baron@uhccux.bitnet | "Make beans into peas!" ICBM: 21 19 N 157 52 W |
car@pte.UUCP (Chris Rende) (09/12/88)
The computer club at my university had a micro that used cassette tapes for for data storage. Getting a tape to load successfully usually required several attempts of adjusting the tape player's volume control and general pampering. One day I walked into the club office and from the ceiling hung a mangled mass of tape and case parts. Attached to the tangled mess was a sign: "Let this be a warning to all tapes which fail to load". car. -- Christopher A. Rende Multics,DTSS,Shortwave,Scanners,StarTrek uunet!edsews!rphroy!pte!car TRS-80 Model I: Buy Sell Trade Motorola VME 1131 M68020 System V Release 2 v2.2 Precise Technology & Electronics, Inc.
jec@nesac2.UUCP (John Carter ATLN SADM) (09/13/88)
A friend who worked in an IBM support center related the following to my daughter: A new PC user called to say that she had found the "DO"s book for the computer, but where was the "DON'T"s book? -- USnail: John Carter, AT&T, Atlanta RWC, 3001 Cobb Parkway, Atlanta GA 30339 Video: ...att!nesac2!jec Voice: 404+951-4642 The machine belongs to the company. The opinions are mine.
clarke@acheron.UUCP (Ed Clarke) (09/13/88)
From article <2616@sugar.uu.net>, by ssd@sugar.uu.net (Scott Denham): > In article <1434@ficc.uu.net>, peter@ficc.uu.net (Peter da Silva) writes: > to clean 'em, either!!! The second was a tape from a land crew that was > discovered to have a .22 slug embedded about halfway down the reel!. After Is this where the term "Trouble Shooting" comes from? Inquiring minds want to know ...
rem@remsit.UUCP (Roger Murray) (09/13/88)
In article <7072@well.UUCP> ewhac@well.UUCP (Leo 'Bols Ewhac' Schwab) writes: > A friend of mine also decided to test the limits of floppy abuse, >except they were reading it on an Apple ][. > > They spilled coffee on it. They put a crease in it, and removed it. >They walked on it. On their way to L.A., they passed it through the X-Ray >machine six times or so. They sat on it. Ultimately, they took it to a >waiting Disk ][ drive, and it booted. Those Disk ][ drives are great. Perhaps this is an Urban Legend as well, but I knew a guy who claimed to have formatted a piece of french toast with one. To this day, I'm still trying to figure out how he managed to get something as thick as a piece of french toast into something as thin as a Disk ][. Aside from that aspect, I have no reason not to believe the guy. He also mentioned something about his sister spilling chocolate syrup all over everything once...:-) -- Roger Murray "Look ma! No ihnp4!" :-) UUCP: ...!{randvax,sdcrdcf,ucbvax}!ucla-cs!cepu!ucla-an!remsit!rem ARPA: cepu!ucla-an!remsit!rem@CS.UCLA.EDU
peter@ficc.uu.net (Peter da Silva) (09/13/88)
In article <2375@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu>, baron@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu (Baron Fujimoto) writes: > We have also seennew users try an insert more than one, or an improperly > oriented 3.5" disk into a macintosh drive... Oh yes. The saying around here is "There are 8 ways to insert a diskette in a drive, only one of which is interesting". -- Peter da Silva `-_-' Ferranti International Controls Corporation. "Have you hugged U your wolf today?" peter@ficc.uu.net
jvte@euraiv1.UUCP (Jan van 't Ent) (09/14/88)
> Here's another one about a compiler purchase.. > .."How many square feet will your new compiler require?" Hey, that's no joke! MicroSofts OS/2 dev.kit at least needs a couple of empty shelves (and don't forget the 3rd-party reference books). And by the way, what's against an inventory sticker on the outside of your expensive software manuals to keep that department happy? (The disks you'll copy anyway, but the books are the thing ;-) <Jan>
rroot@edm.UUCP (Stephen Samuel) (09/14/88)
One of the worst that I've done was a disk cleaning daemon.. Our system
was rather short of space so, to get whatever space I could out of our
system, I edited the core file cleaner to eat core files over 24hrs old.
Due to a typing error (and multiple concurrent edit sessions) one
connective was not removed and I ended up with the following (or something
similar):
find / -name core -o -atime +1 -exec rm '{}' \;
A couple of interesting points about this line:
1: core files were UNTOUCHED (the -o short-circuits the expression)
2: it doesn't usually have immediately obvious effects (all absolutely
NECESSARY files had, of course been accessed in the last 24 hrs)
After this bomb went off (3pm the next day) it's effects weren't
immediately noticable . My first clue was congratulations for fixing the
disk squeeze. I later noticed that SOME (but not all) the MAN entries were
missing. The pattern pointed out where the problem was.
The next few days, of course weren't too pleasing for me, as I tried to fix
the damage...
--
-------------
Stephen Samuel (userzxcv@ualtamts.bitnet or alberta!edm!steve)
MS-DOS : CPM impersonating UNIX ** OS/2 : IBM impersonating APPLErob@idec.stc.co.uk (P.Robinson) (09/14/88)
> (various disc-disaster stories) > ... That reminds me of the time , a few years ago when I left home with my 5" master floppy in my pocket. Suddenly a gust of wind blew it into the road where it was run over by a passing millitary parade and it ended up in a patch of quick- drying cement. When I retrieved it the cement had set so I took it home to recover as I'd lost the backup some days previously. I chiselled off the cement from the disc but then my friend came along and suggested that, as the disc was 'dead', we should see how much damage it could take. We nailed it to the ceiling, and hung the cat from it, then used it at a dart- board, incidentally did you know that if you're a good aim, a dart will exactly fit through the index hole? By now the disc was a little bit grubby so we care-fully opened the black jacket, removed the disc and washed it in boiling water, making good use of the brillo pads. After drying it with my blowtorch I tried it in my disc drive. Nothing happened for a few seconds and then a wisp of smoke slowly rose from theslot. grabbing the disc and stamping out the flames I realised I had placed it in my toaster instead of a drive. I found a 3" drive but unfortunately the discwouldn't fit so I had to cut off the edges until it did. Tentatively I tried toboot and... Imagine my surprise when it worked! all my files were readable, except for the ones stored in the bits I cut off to make it fit the drive. This really happened. I concluded that it only went to show. Has this happened to anyone else?
aad@stpstn.UUCP (Anthony A. Datri) (09/15/88)
There's the story at CMU of a jock who pestered someone in the terminal room because he couldn't comprehend something. "Yeah, here's your problem -- you've got this big file here called *.* that's screwing you up" Need I say more? -- @disclaimer(Any concepts or opinions above are entirely mine, not those of my employer, my GIGI, or my 11/34) beak is beak is not Anthony A. Datri,SysAdmin,StepstoneCorporation,stpstn!aad
greim@sbsvax.UUCP (Michael Greim) (09/15/88)
Once upon a time a guy from another department came into our room
and complained : "Our machine is totally broken. It doesn't do anything."
Well, we had a look, and indeed the machine did not even boot. I
don't remember the exact error message, but it was one which we
had not seen previously. We asked him : "What have you done to the
system?" We let him describe his last actions. And finally truth
was uncovered: he said: "I was looking for some place on the root
file system. I discovered two large files and threw them away. But
I did not notice anything strange happen after that."
"What was their name?" "Aeh, sinix and vmsinix."
(variant of (vm)unix for this machine)
Well, we were able to help him with a copy of ours.
Another time a guy came, who had done the same, that is, thrown away
the system. But instead of asking someone he just thought the disk
was destroyed, and reformatted it using the installation diskettes!
There were also some reports about people who had stripped their system!
-mg
--
email : greim@sbsvax.informatik.uni-saarland.dbp.de
or : ...!uunet!unido!sbsvax!greim
voice : +49 681 302 2434
snail : Michael Greim, Universitaet des Saarlandes, FB 10 - Informatik,
Bau 36, Im Stadtwald 15, D-6600 Saarbruecken 11, West Germany
# include <disclaimers/std.h>biesack@xyzzy.UUCP (Dave Biesack) (09/15/88)
Back in 1981, CS lab sessions at Purdue used a Unix equipped with a line
editor 'led' (The admin people thought vi bogged down the system and
didn't tell people about it). If the editor was invoked without a
filename, you were placed into insert mode, prompted for the first line
with
New file.
1=
I passed by a novice whose display looked like:
New file.
1=1
2=2
3=3
4=4
5=5
6=6
7=7
8=8
She seemed to think it was quizzing her...
djb
--
David J. Biesack
Data General, Research Triangle Park, NC
{ihnp4, seismo, ...}!mcnc!rti!dg-rtp!biesack
biesack@dg-rtp.dg.comruffwork@orstcs.CS.ORST.EDU (Ritchey Ruff) (09/15/88)
or how about the time I created a file by accident named "*" in my directory of sources for my MS (this was on a Unix machine). "Oh, drat! where did THAT dropping come from..." $ rm * "there that takes care of it..boy the system's slow today..." ;-);-);-);-( --ritchey "It's the computer's fault, we humans NEVER make mistaks!" ruffwork@cs.orst.edu -or- ...!tektronix!orstcs!ruffwork
bms@beta.lanl.gov (Barbara M Sandoval) (09/16/88)
After working as a consultant in the terminal room of the college I went to, I took a job here at the Lab in the PC-Help section. There are anywhere from 3 - 7 of us at any given time (student help); there are over 6,000 IBMs and clones here, and we support all of them, running any kind of DOS applications. Needless to say, things get pretty weird here. Anyway, after doing consulting at college, I thought I knew just how stupid some people can be, but I was amazed at how wrong I was. We've had several people call asking which was the `any' key - one guy that got that question said "Just a minute, I'll look it up", then grabbed a manual and flipped through the pages of it right over the reciever. Then he picked the reciever up and said "Gee, I can't find it in here! Why don't you try hitting return and see if that works?" The woman thanked him profusely, and insisted that he was the only one who could help her after that. Of course, knowing something about micros doesn't guarantee against mistakes. My father put a diskette into his MAC II backwards, with the metal slide on the outside of the drive. They will go in that way quite easily, but it took a pair of flat forceps to get it back out. Or the time a woman called, quite upset, because "My VTerm quit working, and I don't know why", and it turned out her gandalf was turned off. Then my boneheaded stunt was spending almost an hour re-writing batch files for someone to switch from one kind of printer to the other, with no success, then checking and finding out they were connected to the same port! (She needed a T-switch, not batch files)
wersan@dasys1.UUCP (John R Wersan Jr.) (09/16/88)
This may or may not fit here but...... I work for a computer company that supplies FIS systems (Financial Information Systems) to brokerage houses in New York, one of the video displays is sort of a list of constantly updateing stock prices, as with any monitor, they sometimes need to be replaced. I can not tell you how many times, as I was about to remove the monitor, I have seen a trader feverisly attempt to write down all of the stocks on the screen, which is always followed by the statement "Has this monitor been programed the same as the one you are takeing?". To which I reply "When you buy a new T.V..... Do you get different stations???". And to think that these very same people are responsable for the nations finances!!!! This scares me!!!!! -- John R. Wersan, Jr. Big Electric Cat Public UNIX ..!cmcl2!phri!dasys1!wersan
friedl@vsi.UUCP (Stephen J. Friedl) (09/16/88)
For fun, do this on your friend's terminal when s/he is not looking.
Make sure this person owns the file...
$ echo "README: permission denied" > README
--
Steve Friedl V-Systems, Inc. +1 714 545 6442 3B2-kind-of-guy
friedl@vsi.com {backbones}!vsi.com!friedl attmail!vsi!friedl
------------Nancy Reagan on conductance: "Just say mho"------------dtynan@sultra.UUCP (Dermot Tynan) (09/17/88)
OK, I wasn't going to post this, I'm embarassed. If anyone laughs, there'll
be blood spilt. At home, I run Minix on my XT, and as of yet, do not have a
backup program running. On the 10Mb hard disk, is all the source, some
business accounts, etc. Anyway, Minix uses half of memory as a RAM disk, so
I thought I'd remove that 'feature' from the source. The kernel uses this
RAM disk as the root device. Not bothering to sit down and stare at the code,
I just made a quick change. I changed the root device from the RAM disk to
the hard disk, and rebooted the system. I wanted the HD to appear as /, etc.
As the system booted, I noticed that the floppy drive was active, as was the
hard disk. It occurred to me this wasn't good. When the system came up, it
barfed because /usr/bin was missing, etc. It was then I realized that the
Minix kernel does an 'mkfs' on the root device, on powerup, and copies
everything from the floppy to the root device. I still don't have the nerve to
turn on the system. Gues what I'll be doing for the weekend...
- Der
--
Reply: dtynan@sultra.UUCP (Dermot Tynan @ Tynan Computers)
{mips,pyramid}!sultra!dtynan
Cast a cold eye on life, on death. Horseman, pass by... [WBY]rbt@cernvax.UUCP (rbt) (09/17/88)
What about that guy in U.S. that got a brand new plate for his car. I do not know why, but he choose the word "NONE". Well, the following month he received a ridicolous fee from the local police station. He was always parking in the wrong place, many times a day, sometimes even twice or three times in different parts of the town. Finally, he went to the police station to complain. There they worked out that the bill was computer-made, and the standard plate reported for plateless car was "NONE". He changed plate.
davidsen@steinmetz.ge.com (William E. Davidsen Jr) (09/18/88)
I have had to recover a few disks, too. I dropped one on the floor and
leaned over to pick it up. Unfortunately I was leaning back in my chair
when it dropped and I put the leg of the chair right on the disk. Lost
about 60% of the data, but salvaged what I didn't have backed up by
ignoring the parity errors.
I have a friend who is desperately worried about air polution, who
screams "animal hair" and suggests that I use positive pressure in the
computer room. The only problem I've had with hair came from something
later identified as coming from my beard.
My animal problems are more typical. Remember the kid who always said he
didn't have his homework because " the dog ate it?" I had a puppy gnaw
on a floppy, which did not miraculously work afterword. She also at a
record and the cover of a large dictionary. I did salvage a disk which
was washed in cat piss, after removing it, washing it, and putting it
back in a clean cover. A monitor treated the same way couldn't be saved,
the tech claimed it ate a layer out of the motherboard.
Now I have a nice locked room, and no one sits on my lap when I type...
--
bill davidsen (wedu@ge-crd.arpa)
{uunet | philabs}!steinmetz!crdos1!davidsen
"Stupidity, like virtue, is its own reward" -merroot@edm.UUCP (Stephen Samuel) (09/18/88)
From article <856@viscous>, by brianm@sco.COM (Brian Moffet): > > Friend of mine talked to a man once who had done the following > command on a Xenix machine: > > # cat /etc/wtmp > /dev/hd00 Similarly, was something which happened to a friend of mine some years ago: He knows much better now, and is probably on the net.. (hi, Gilles!) Background: on BSD4.1, the default display format for 'ls' (when printing to a terminal) was (seemed to be) the equivalent of -F ([dir] executable*) with unprintable chars as '?'. Gilles, one day ended up with a file who's name was a single, unprintable character. When he did an 'ls', of course, this came up as ?* file1 [dir1] file2 file3 .... Not wanting to have this stupid file around, of course, he tried to remove it: `rm ?*` and got a few complaints from 'rm' about trying to remove directories. I came intothe picture when he started trying to figure where most of his files had gone to. It was close enough to "the mythical RM STAR" to be rather impressive to those who knew better. Thankfully the system (!alberta ) had a good backup regimen. ------ Then again, there was the SECOND YEAR student whom I had (roughly) the following conversation over an APL terminal printout. "What does this message mean? ('VALUE ERROR')" "oh, that's easy: it means your variable is undefined." "hunh?" "You haven't assigned a value to it.. You have to have assigned a value to a variable before you can print it out!" student goes DOWN the listing about 3 pages. "but I did that right here!!!" "(guh!) You're in SECOND YEAR??!" -- ------------- Stephen Samuel (userzxcv@ualtamts.bitnet or alberta!edm!steve) MS-DOS : CPM impersonating UNIX ** OS/2 : IBM impersonating APPLE
rich@jolnet.ORPK.IL.US (Rich Andrews) (09/18/88)
In article <501@remsit.UUCP> rem@remsit.UUCP (Roger Murray) writes: >In article <7072@well.UUCP> ewhac@well.UUCP (Leo 'Bols Ewhac' Schwab) writes: >> A friend of mine also decided to test the limits of floppy abuse, >>except they were reading it on an Apple ][. >> >> They spilled coffee on it. They put a crease in it, and removed it. >>They walked on it. On their way to L.A., they passed it through the X-Ray >>machine six times or so. They sat on it. Ultimately, they took it to a >>waiting Disk ][ drive, and it booted. > >Those Disk ][ drives are great. Perhaps this is an Urban Legend as well, >but I knew a guy who claimed to have formatted a piece of french toast with >one. To this day, I'm still trying to figure out how he managed to get > >He also mentioned something about his sister spilling chocolate syrup all over >everything once...:-) >-- >Roger Murray You guys are really something else...If you think that those disk][ drives are really great you should take a look at the incredible drive that I have on my 3b2. Not only can I format french toast, but I can do croissants, bagels, doughnuts, and even pizza. The good part is that I can also format paper plates, used pizza cardboard, standard notebook paper and even toilet paper! The chocolate syrup is of no real detriment to the integrity of the data stored on a floppy. I seems to make to data "hard" as it takes about 4 tries at re-formatting to make the disk "clean" again. I haven't bought a floppy disk in months. If I really want premium disks, I cut a picture of a floppy out of a magazine and use that. Now that is the ultimate. When i need a dc-600 for the tape drive, that is another story. I use rubber bands and Malt-O-Meal boxes for that. I have been able to get 3.3 gigabytes on one of those! There is a small problem with band breakage at high densities like that, so I usually limit it to about 600 meg per cartridge. Some day I will dive into hy hard drives to see what I can get out of them. BTW the write only memory chip in my Alus 2012 computer is bad. Does anyone know where I can get a replacement? Thanks in advance, rich andrews -- Any opinions expressed are my own. Now, for a limited time, they can be yours too, for the incredible price of only $19.95. Simply send $19.95 (in Alterian dollars) to ...killer!jolnet!rich or rich@jolnet.orpk.il.us.
sbc@sp7040.UUCP (Stephen Carroll) (09/20/88)
In article <1109@idec.stc.co.uk>, rob@idec.stc.co.uk (P.Robinson) writes: > > (various disc-disaster stories) > > ... > > That reminds me of the time , a few years ago when I left home with my 5" > master floppy in my pocket. Suddenly a gust of wind blew it into the road > where it was run over by a passing millitary parade and it ended up in a > patch of quick-drying cement. > > [ Lot's of incredible stuff deleted... ] > > Imagine my surprise when it worked! all my files were readable, except for > the ones stored in the bits I cut off to make it fit the drive. > > This really happened. I concluded that it only went to show. > > Has this happened to anyone else? Well, not exactly with disk drives, but I was once travelling to middle Florida to demonstrate a new portable computer system to a large company there. As our plane was descending for landing at the local airport, the door blew off the luggage compartment at the bottom of the plane, and several pieces of luggage fell out, my computer system included. Well, imagine my chagrin, when upon landing, we are informed of the unfortunate incident. Because billions of dollars depended on my presentation, now just 45 minutes away, I quickly set about retrieving the remains of my system. I quickly gained hope of finding it in one piece when I found out that the land surrounding the airport was all swamp land, with lots of marshy bogs to cushion the landing of my equipment. Well, needless to say, I quickly chartered an airboat and set out in the general direction of the planes heading into the airport. Fortunately, my company had built some good equipment, not the least of which included a little miniature black box on the motherboard which emitted a strong homing signal when dropped from heights. After only 15 minutes, we located the machine, only to find an alligator using it for a teething ring. Well my guide was well experienced with this sort of thing and quickly seduced the alligator into dropping the computer for something better. He was a Scottsman who had raised sheep in a previous lifetime. (That's another story though.) Well, to make a short story longer, I rushed to my appointment. I plopped my mud stained, water logged machine on the desk set up for me and quickly plugged it in. I was hoping that the internal fan would quickly dry out the master cpu in the 22 seconds before my demonstration was to start. Well, after a few sparks and a couple whisps of smoke, the machine actually powered up. Can you believe it?!?! Then reaching into my back pocket for the boot floppy, I almost lost my shorts! That darn alligator had lifted it while I had my back turned!!! Well, now used to thinking on my feet, I borrowed a floppy from someone there, and using my handy-dandy spy decoder ring and pocket power magnet, quickly magnetized the floppy to contain the proper boot sequence for my machine. I then demonstrated the internetworking and interoffice capabilities of my machine, and you know what, these guys actually applauded. It was great! Not only did they buy billions of dollars worth of equipment from me, but they didn't even bill me for bumping the company presidents Ferrari with my double parked airboat!! Has this ever happened to anyone else? Please email, as I try not to use my computer unless absolutely necessary. I'll post any responses if there is enough interest.....
kjell@venus.ucsc.edu (Kjell Post,,,4238760) (09/20/88)
This happened to me when I was teaching data structures last spring: One of the students is debugging his Pascal program that is supposed to do some simple hashing. Suddenly the terminal gives up (they do that sometimes) so he moves to another one, logs in and starts up the debugger again. After a while he calls for help. - "I get this 'index out of range' all the time." - "Hm, [examines one of the variables] you haven't called the init procedure." - "Yes I have [and points to the previous terminal...]" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Y F = F(Y F) ! Kjell Post, Dept of Comp & Info Sciences "This superamazing, clever thing" ! University of California, Santa Cruz -- G.J.Sussman ! Email: kjell@saturn.ucsc.edu
al@gtx.com (Alan Filipski) (09/20/88)
In article <827@cernvax.UUCP> rbt@cernvax.UUCP () writes:
*
*What about that guy in U.S. that got a brand new plate for his car. I do not
*know why, but he choose the word "NONE". Well, the following month he received
*a ridicolous fee from the local police station. He was always parking in the
*wrong place, many times a day, sometimes even twice or three times in different
*parts of the town.
*
*Finally, he went to the police station to complain. There they worked out that
*the bill was computer-made, and the standard plate reported for plateless car
*was "NONE".
*
*He changed plate.
sounds like a missed opportunity to me. If he were creative, he would
have argued with whoever types in the license numbers to translate
"NONE" into something else, like "-----". He would then be free to
park wherever he chose.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
( Alan Filipski, GTX Corp, 8836 N. 23rd Avenue, Phoenix, Arizona 85021, USA )
( {allegra,decvax,hplabs,amdahl,nsc}!sun!sunburn!gtx!al (602)870-1696 )
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~jpr@dasys1.UUCP (Pierre Radley") (09/20/88)
In article <1216@auschs.UUCP> sauer@auschs.UUCP (Charlie Sauer) writes: >............ But all of the I/O cards, memory cards and the processor >card had standing water on them! > >I wiped up the water as well as I could with paper towels, pulled all the >cards and let them stand vertically to drain, and waited an hour or so.... One a year or so, I pull the printed circuit boards from my CPU and my keyboard and run them through my dishwasher, using a minimal amount of detergent, and absolutely avoiding the machine's dry cycle. I just let the boards dry in the wind. Living in New York City, and being a smoker, I do find quite a bit of crud on the boards. -- Time is nature's way of Jean-Pierre Radley making sure that everything ..!cmcl2!phri!dasys1!jpr doesn't happen all at once. CIS: 76120,1341
gjh@otter.hple.hp.com (Graham Higgins) (09/21/88)
When I was a grad student, one of my colleagues was having some problems coming to terms with computers - he came from a South Mediterranean country where computer literacy is scarce. The course in non-numeric programming started off on Superbrains, which he eventually learned to operate, then we moved on to remote terminals connected to a Vax. One day, as I was passing the computer lab I heard this bellow "Gromm, Gromm!, is no work!" - the guy was bouncing up and down on both shift keys together - the Superbrain has the shift keys in red plastic, hitting both together resets the machine - it took me some time to explain that he *couldn't* reset the Vax in similar fashion (but the mind boggles - what if ...?). Another time, again passing the computer lab ... "Gromm Gromm!, is no work!" He had a LISP function, suitably indented, sprawling across the screen. I peered at this for some time and couldn't see anything wrong with it. I thought I could at least try it, so I cursored down the screen and pressed Return --- "login:" it said! On that topic, a colleague tells me of a LISP vendor who sold a LISP to some defence company, only to be phoned some months later by the purchaser who complained "Your compiler won't handle our function." Alarmed and puzzled (at the usage of the singular "function"), the company sent out an engineer, only to find that they *did* have just the one function, six months and several inches of printout's worth of function! In another life, I used to work for a wholesaler which had recently moved to a computerised terminal system in the buying office. The "girls" in the buying office were used to hand-administered systems and computer terminals were somewhat new to them. One afternoon I came back from lunch and found them all cowering behind a low filing cabinet, peering over the top, in quite a state of panic. I asked what was the problem and they pointed to one of the terminals. Some joker down in the computer room had used the messaging facility to write on the 25th line the following message ... "WARNING! Temperature overload! This terminal will explode in 30 seconds!" Cheers, Graham (Gromm) Higgins HP Labs Bristol, U.K.
bobmon@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu (RAMontante) (09/21/88)
>> >>He also mentioned something about his sister spilling chocolate syrup all over >>everything once...:-) We used to DREEEEAAAMMM about chocolate syrup on our floppies! It was the only stuff that would cool the nuclear fires enough for us to pry the glowing remnants of magnetic coating out of the reactor cores! I had a floppy that actually attacked the drive one night! Two full magazines from an AK-47 didn't even slow it down. As it leapt sideways into the drive slot we hacked at it with fireaxes. No luck! Eventually we cut all power to the computer center and called in SAC for repeated air strikes! We still got 87.2% of the data off the disk, which was enough for it to replicate onto another disk and start infecting IBM's Watson Research Center! And ya try to tell these kids nowadays what computing used to be like, they don't even believe ya.... -- -- bob,mon (bobmon@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu) -- "Aristotle was not Belgian..." - Wanda
craig@lakesys.UUCP (Craig Stodolenak) (09/21/88)
Getting to be like stories that I remember Commander McBragg telling his
butler... :-)
--
Craig L. Stodolenak | {backbone,uunet}!marque!lakesys!craig
3454 So. Quincy Ave. | craig@lakesys.UUCP / Lake Systems, Milwaukee WI
Milwaukee, WI 53207 |--------------------------------------------------------
(414) 482-0399 | "DON'T call me stupid!" - Otto, 'A Fish Called Wanda'siegel@magni.cs.cornell.edu (Alexander Siegel) (09/21/88)
Back when I was a private entrepreneur who dealt in poltically questionable merchandise on the Orion Mazeworlds, I had an interesting experience. Well, I kept my financial records on disposable media, highly disposable media. Actually the media was a highly magnetized soap bubble. During one of my more profitable transactions on one of the lesser moons in the system, we were attacked by the police. I do not know why they attacked us; on the way in they mumbled something about not have a license to deal in hand held atomics. Well, to make a long story even longer, we had a fire fight which incinerated that moon and the two nearest planets. Disaster! My financial record were lost! I came back 20 years later after an extended visit to the police mental adjustment program to see what could be salvaged. I sat and blew magnetized bubbles in the approximate vacinity of the explosion (the area was still pretty hot) until one day I found one that looked right. I put it in my drive and managed 97% data recovery! Alex Siegel - CS graduate drudge at Cornell a.k.a. Scimitar; a.k.a. Phineas Ginn (SCA); a.k.a. Trash siegel@cs.cornell.edu (607)255-1165
mfr@camcon.co.uk (Mike Richardson) (09/22/88)
An earlier folly mentions watering some bit of computer equipment. I once spilt a cup of coffee into the electronics on a drum line printer. OOps, I though, as the output became scrambled, I'm going to have to admit to this. However, on closed inspection, the line lengths were OK and the line and page throws were still correct, just the printing characters mixed up, so it looked like the coffee had just got to the circuits controlling the print hammer timing. Intrigued, I peered closer and, after a minute or so, some characters seemed to be coming out correctly. I quickly set some more print jobs going, to keep the machine busy, and, lo-and-behold, over a few minutes, everything gradually corrected itself. Phew, I got away with it, and the printer worked fine until scrapped a few years ago. On a different note, there was a report in a computer paper here a few years ago about an operator who had been sacked (dismissed) after being discovered one night shift with his car in the computer room, having removed several of the false floor panels to use as a work pit!
cliff@se-sd.sandiego.ncr.com (Cliff Bamford) (09/23/88)
I was taking my diskette over to a friend's house when a gust of
wind blew off all my clothes, including the diskette in my back pocket,
which (wouldn't ya just know it!) landed in a black hole that my
freind's kids had created with their chemistry set and left lying
right there in the driveway (the little rascals!)
Naturally, I had some unexposed Xray plates handy, so I quickly
held them up in a position to intercept the fluxions emanating from
our side of the event horizon. After drying the plates with a hair
drier, and inserting them (without reformatting) into my freind's
drive, we were able to recover fully 68% of my original data, PLUS
several gigabytes from a parallel space-time continuum that
described how to cure cancer, the secret of immortality, and
why David Letterman has his own show! Unfortunatly, it was all
copyrighted, so we of course had to erase it.
You can bet I'll be more careful the NEXT time I drive over to my freind's!
--
cliff.bamford@sandiego.ncr.com (619)693-5724 {ucsd,cbosgd}!ncr-sd!se-sd!cliffrroot@edm.UUCP (Stephen Samuel) (09/23/88)
From article <827@cernvax.UUCP>, by rbt@cernvax.UUCP (rbt): > > Finally, he went to the police station to complain. There they worked out that > the bill was computer-made, and the standard plate reported for plateless car > was "NONE". > He changed plate. I has a similar problem: I had two IDs at one time: LIST and NONE (all accounts on MTS are 4 chars long). (this was on our MTS (Michigan Terminal System) machine -- an amdahl (V8 at the time) capable of handling about 500 people at once (~7-800 on our new machine).. Needless to say, it's the main processor for non-admin work on the campus) ANYWAYS: One day I started recieving stacks of mail saying that I had printouts from our PLATO (cai) system). MTS was used for all PLATO printing, and they had just started notifying people who had MTS accounts when their print jobs were done. Lots of people when they filled out their PLATO ID had filled in 'none' in the "MTS Account" box. I complained to the people in charge of PLATO and got a note back that the problem would be fixed "fast". a day, or so, later, my mail tripled (100+ messages/day) and I sent another message. What had happened is that they had made any ID with NONE as their MTS accound the same as IDs with blanks as their MTS account, but somebody had a wrong-way branch, and ALL thos people got messages going to me.... (yeuch)... The problem was handled with dispatch. The account LIST, on the other hand, had other problems. There was a relatively new program (UNSP:HASPLOG) that allowed users to get info about print jobs they had sent off in the last few days (Really useful if you've forgotten your print job #). Unfortunately, hasplog always refused to acknowledge print jobs I'd sent off. whenever I queried for jobs sent off by me, hasplog would reply: 'no jobs submitted by user LIST' The consultants claimed that I just wasn't waiting long enough for the hasp queue results to get to UNSP:HASPLOG (I STILL don't know why there's a delay in the first place). Finally I gave them a listing of a terminal session that looked (roughly) as follows: Locate User LIST No jobs submitted by user "LIST". Locate Job 803447 Job 803447 (5534234) submitted by user LIST at ...... Locate User LIST No jobs submitted by user "LIST". A couple of days later, the person in charge of UNSP:HASPLOG told me that The account LIST was used at Michigan to print listings of card decks.. so when I used UNSP:HASPLOG to locate jobs by user 'LIST', hasplog treated it as a special case (security considerations -- you need the pring job # to get the print job). Oh well: my logins are now: ASDF and ZXCV. (easier to type, and no special-case problems...). -- ------------- Stephen Samuel Disclaimer: You betcha! {ihnp4,ubc-vision,seismo!mnetor,vax135}!alberta!edm!steve BITNET: USERZXCV@UQV-MTS
aad@stpstn.UUCP (Anthony A. Datri) (09/23/88)
In article <1860004@otter.hple.hp.com> gjh@otter.hple.hp.com (Graham Higgins) writes: >thought I could at least try it, so I cursored down the screen and pressed >Return --- "login:" it said! I once had a user who had spend half an hour or so typing in a paper. TO ROM BASIC (on a pc). The "Syntax Error" messages (or whatever) after every line didn't seem to matter to him. I'm reminded of the columbia user who wanted to run pdp-10 executables on his trs-80. >"WARNING! Temperature overload! This terminal will explode in 30 seconds!" "clear >/dev/ttyxx" has a way of scaring people as well.; -- @disclaimer(Any concepts or opinions above are entirely mine, not those of my employer, my GIGI, or my 11/34) beak is beak is not Anthony A. Datri,SysAdmin,StepstoneCorporation,stpstn!aad
hiebeler@rpics (Dave Hiebeler) (09/23/88)
This subject has apparently turned into "Who can concoct the most insane story about computer media possible"... while these were OK at first, after a while they all start to look the same (diskette was run over by a tank, diskette was dropped from orbit and fell to Earth, and still had 80% of its data, disk drive which was able to format a frisbee, etc). Perhaps follow-ups should be re-directed to rec.humor. --- Dave Hiebeler Internet: hiebeler@cs.rpi.edu (preferred address) R.D. Box 225A userfrzk%mts@itsgw.rpi.edu Chatham, NY 12037 Bitnet: userfrzk@rpitsmts.bitnet "xue zai xao"
jvte@euraiv1.UUCP (Jan van 't Ent) (09/23/88)
Could all those tall tales please be redirected to the appropriate location (null) so the real follies can be enjoyed (without any aggreviating garbage to wade through)? Thank you, <Jan>
sbc@sp7040.UUCP (Stephen Carroll) (09/23/88)
In article <21199@cornell.UUCP>, siegel@magni.cs.cornell.edu (Alexander Siegel) writes:
] Back when I was a private entrepreneur who dealt in poltically
] questionable merchandise on the Orion Mazeworlds, I had an interesting
] ...
] I came back 20 years later after an extended visit to the
] police mental adjustment program to see what could be salvaged. I sat
] and blew magnetized bubbles in the approximate vacinity of the
] explosion (the area was still pretty hot) until one day I found one
] that looked right. I put it in my drive and managed 97% data
] recovery!
]
] Alex Siegel - CS graduate drudge at Cornell
] a.k.a. Scimitar; a.k.a. Phineas Ginn (SCA); a.k.a. Trash
] siegel@cs.cornell.edu (607)255-1165
where can a person get a bubble drive like this? it's got to be the greatest
invention ever! a way to save money and entertain the kid at the same time!!
inquiring minds want to know! :=))...rem@remsit.UUCP (Roger Murray) (09/23/88)
In article <813@jolnet.ORPK.IL.US> rich@jolnet.ORPK.IL.US (Rich Andrews) writes: >You guys are really something else...If you think that those >disk][ drives are really great you should take a look at the >incredible drive that I have on my 3b2. > [examples of gourmet formatting deleted] > >I haven't bought a floppy disk in months. If I really want >premium disks, I cut a picture of a floppy out of a magazine >and use that. Now that is the ultimate. Ok. You beat me. I tried to photocopy a floppy once with the school photocopier. It looked picture perfect, but I could never get it to boot. I'd send it to you, but it's an Apple program. You wouldn't be able to boot the disk anyway. :-) Hmmm...maybe I should get a 3B2. I think I'll go cut one out of UNIX WORLD... :-) -- Roger Murray "Look ma! No ihnp4!" :-) UUCP: ...!{randvax,sdcrdcf,ucbvax}!ucla-cs!cepu!ucla-an!remsit!rem ARPA: cepu!ucla-an!remsit!rem@CS.UCLA.EDU
friedl@vsi.UUCP (Stephen J. Friedl) (09/24/88)
In article <1245@imagine.PAWL.RPI.EDU>, hiebeler@rpics (Dave Hiebeler) writes:
< This subject has apparently turned into "Who can concoct the most insane
< story about computer media possible"... [...]
< Perhaps follow-ups should be re-directed to rec.humor.
I like this kind of thinking, but how about to rec.enough.already.ok?
--
Steve Friedl V-Systems, Inc. +1 714 545 6442 3B2-kind-of-guy
friedl@vsi.com {backbones}!vsi.com!friedl attmail!vsi!friedl
------[I'm on vacation in Ohio from 26-Sep to 10-Oct 1988]----------daryl@arthur.uchicago.edu (Daryl McLaurine) (09/24/88)
In article <1635@se-sd.sandiego.ncr.com> cliff@se-sd.sandiego.NCR.COM (Cliff Bamford) writes: >I was taking my diskette over to a friend's house when a gust of [...then a miracle happens...] >You can bet I'll be more careful the NEXT time I drive over to my freind's! > > >-- >cliff.bamford@sandiego.ncr.com (619)693-5724 {ucsd,cbosgd}!ncr-sd!se-sd!cliff Wha??? ^ <{[-]}>----------------------------------------------------------------------- V Daryl McLaurine, Programmer/Analyst (Consultant) | Contact: | Home: 1-312-955-2803 (Voice M-F 7pm/1am) | Office: Computer Innovations 1-312-663-5930 (Voice M-F 9am/5pm) | daryl@arthur (or zaphod,daisy,neuro,zem,beeblebrox) .UChicago.edu ==\*/=========================================================================
william@pyr1.cs.ucl.ac.uk (09/27/88)
I once typed "rm *.old" to get rid of some old editor backup files, and came out as "rm * old". It sat there for a few moments, and then said "old: file does not exist". Damn. I used Televideo 910 terminals as an undergrad, and when you logged off, the system cleared your screen. Once, I typed LOGOFF and then realised I needed the data currently on the screen, so I hit CTRL-S hard just as the first carriage returns came through to scroll the screen. And the terminal just stopped - no logoff message, nothing - and nothing that I did made any difference. It was definitely the terminal that went, as I tried plugging different terminals into the same socket, and power-off didn't help. I couldn't believe this, so I replicated the situation and killed another terminal. Later on, I mentioned this to a friend who didn't believe it either, so he promptly killed one and demoed it to someone else. Within an hour, half of the college terminals were extinct which was amazingly popular as it was the middle of the project season, and about a week later the dead terminals were taken away and were replaced after a further week. ... Bill ************************************************************************ Bill Witts, CS Dept. * Nel Mezzo del cammin di nostra vita UCL, London, Errrp * mi ritrovai per una selva oscura william@cs.ucl.ac.uk * che la diritta via era smarrita. ************************************************************************
smartin@iemisi.UUCP (Stephen Martin) (09/27/88)
Here is a story that i heard from a girl in a bar the other night. She swearst
that it is true. It seems that she works at a government office in downtown
Toronto somewhere and that they were having trouble with one of their computers
crashing. The problem was investigated and finally tracked down to the fact
that one of the girls in the office has a habit of wearing silk underware. The
underware is suspected of building up a static charge and zapping the
workstation. The solution to the problem is that they now have this poor
girl chained to her desk by a ground strap around her ankle. I want to know
how they found out what she was wearing under her clothes.
--
___ ___ ___ ___ _ _ ___
/__/ / / /__ / /\ / / _ Stephen Martin, Boeing Canada, Toronto.
/__/ /__/ /__ _/_ / / /__/ "Nuke gay whales for Jesus"
UUCP: {geac|utzoo|utgpu}!syntron!jtsv16!marsal1!iemisi!smartin
suncan!jtsv16!marsal1!iemisi!smartinrich@island.uu.net (Rich Fanning ) (09/27/88)
Back in the mid 70's, I was a member of an IBM Explorers Group. This was a
program which allowed a couple of dozen high-school students to learn
about computers at a local IBM building.
We were allowed partial use of a computer room (occasionally pre-empted by
IBM engineers) and had access to three different systems: one was a
single-user system which ran BASIC, one was timeshared APL, and the other
ran batch Fortran jobs on those little System/3 cards.
Our long-suffering leader John had to put up with a variety of pranks that
hyperactive adolescent males are best at. My friend Pat figured out how to
punch the System/3 cards to create any pattern. Since the holes are circles
(not oblong like the big 80-column ones), nice bitmap graphics could
be done, in a limited fashion, of course. John put up with this silliness
until Pat started passing around cards with the "one finger salute" on them.
Another friend, Todd, loved to run his "line printer screamer" program on the
1401, which printed 132 M's on each line. This printer, enclosed in a sound-
absorbent shroud, normally didn't arouse attention, but shrieked like hell when
this pattern was printed. All activity in the room would stop, John would run
over to the console and abort the job, and the rest of us would snicker.
One evening, a bunch of white-shirters came in (IBM engineers) and ran a couple
of jobs on the System/3. They stood around the printer, tearing jobs off and
looking them over. After a while, several of them left half-full coffee cups
on top of the printer cover.
I have a feeling that someone made sure that the paper was running low, because
the paper ran out and the printer responded as usual BY LIFTING THE COVER!
By the time anyone knew what was happening, it was too late and half
a dozen cups of coffee slid down the printer cover and splashed all over the
wall, floor, output listings, etc.
Even John had a good laugh over that one. I'll never forget the embarrassed
expressions on some of those engineer's faces.
--
Rich Fanning {uunet,sun,well}!island!rich (415) 491-1000
Island Graphics Corp. 4000 Civic Center Drive San Rafael, CA 94903 tneff@dasys1.UUCP (Tom Neff) (09/27/88)
Mike Richardson's tale of the coffee-splattered drum printer that printed ASCII hash for a long time before slowly correcting itself leads me to wonder something: If you kept ladling coffee in at regular intervals, and kept the printer running indefinitely, would it eventually print out Shakespeare's entire oeuvre? -- Tom Neff UUCP: ...!cmcl2!phri!dasys1!tneff "None of your toys CIS: 76556,2536 MCI: TNEFF will function..." GEnie: TOMNEFF BIX: t.neff (no kidding)
rlk@telesoft.UUCP (Bob Kitzberger @sation) (09/27/88)
While working as a software engineer for a much-too-large previous employer,
I set up software and cabling to allow file transfers between one of our PC
clones and a Macintosh sitting next to it. I did this for my own use, but
since I'm such a nice guy :-) I posted "File transfer is available. If you
have problems transferring files, call me" above the machines.
Inevitably, I received a call soon after. I told the person I'd be right
over.
I watched as they did all the right things setting up the Mac and the PC.
The Macintosh file transfer menu came up with a list of all the files on the
PC's hard disk, just like it should. The person turned to me and said "See,
I seem to be able to transfer Lotus 1-2-3 to the Mac without a problem. But
when I try to run it..."
--
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bob Kitzberger Internet : telesoft!rlk@ucsd
TeleSoft uucp : ucsd.ucsd.edu!telesoft!rlk
5959 Cornerstone Ct. West at&t : (619) 457-2700 x163
San Diego, CA 92121-9891 other : yell out window when pointing SW
"Nuclear weapons can wipe out life on earth, if used properly"
-- Talking Heads
-------------------------------------------------------------------------ray3rd@ssc-vax.UUCP (Ray E Saddler III) (09/27/88)
In article <358@iemisi.UUCP>, smartin@iemisi.UUCP (Stephen Martin) writes: > > [story of a girls computer crashing because she was wearing silk > panties, requiring a ground strap...] > ___ ___ ___ ___ _ _ ___ > /__/ / / /__ / /\ / / _ Stephen Martin, Boeing Canada, Toronto. > /__/ /__/ /__ _/_ / / /__/ "Nuke gay whales for Jesus" > > UUCP: {geac|utzoo|utgpu}!syntron!jtsv16!marsal1!iemisi!smartin > suncan!jtsv16!marsal1!iemisi!smartin Steve, I heard this story (not in such detail (Canads EH?) from one of our Computervision repairmen. Could this be a urban myth known only to hardware repair[men/women]? (by the way, I like your logo in the .signature B^} ) -- | Ray E. Saddler III | __ __ __ __ | Path: ..!ssc-vax!ray3rd | | Boeing Aerospace | / / / // //| // | From: ray3rd@ssc-vax.UUCP | | P.O. Box 3999 m.s. 3R-05 | /-< / //- // |// _ |---------------------------| | Seattle, Wa. 98124 USA | /__//_//__ // //__/ | VoiceNet: (206) 657-2824 |
rjd@occrsh.ATT.COM (Randy_Davis) (09/28/88)
In article <6672@dasys1.UUCP> tneff@dasys1.UUCP (Tom Neff) writes:
:Mike Richardson's tale of the coffee-splattered drum printer that
:printed ASCII hash for a long time before slowly correcting itself
:leads me to wonder something: If you kept ladling coffee in at
:regular intervals, and kept the printer running indefinitely, would
:it eventually print out Shakespeare's entire oeuvre?
Naw, you would still need an infinite number of monkeys to do the ladeling,
wouldn't you?msf@prandtl.nas.nasa.gov (Michael S. Fischbein) (09/28/88)
I worked designing microprocessor based fire and security
alarm systems for skyscrapers, back when microprocessors were a
brand new idea. Well, we had development systems from two
vendors and only one terminal. I came up with a cable to hook
the ASR-33 up to the other development system so we didn't have to wait
for that vendor to get a terminal to us. I carefully checked the
connections, plugged the cable into the terminal and put a trusty VOM
on the connections to make sure the signals were right.
OK. Both off, connect the ASR-33 to the computer. Turn on the
computer. Turn on the teletype. POP! Hissss... Yank both cords out
of the power strip. Notice blue smoke coming out of the computer.
Go back and measure the signals on the data connector with
an O-scope. Gee, there's a 40 volt AC square wave superimposed on the
TTL signal.....
We tell the vendor of system 1 (that supplied the teletype) what's
wrong with the teletype and ask for a replacement. No, that's the way
it is supposed to work. Yep, sure it is. That's OK, they'll install it
on their development system.
They plug the teletype to their machine when it arrives. POP!
Hisss... They take it to their local distribution center, the
service engineer checks it out thoroughly, ``repairs'' it, hooks it up
to one of their systems. POP! Hisss.... Two systems later, he admits
mystification and ships the killer teletype back to the factory in
California. Last I heard, the teletype had vaporized three systems
back at the factory and they couldn't figure out what was wrong.
mike
Michael Fischbein msf@prandtl.nas.nasa.gov
...!seismo!decuac!csmunix!icase!msf
These are my opinions and not necessarily official views of any
organization.davef@brspyr1.BRS.Com (Dave Fiske) (09/28/88)
In article <6561@dasys1.UUCP>, jpr@dasys1.UUCP (Pierre Radley") writes: > One a year or so, I pull the printed circuit boards from my CPU and my > keyboard and run them through my dishwasher, using a minimal amount of > detergent, and absolutely avoiding the machine's dry cycle. I just let > the boards dry in the wind. Don't you get ugly water spots on them, though? Or do you use Cascade? -- "TAMMY FAYE'S HEARTBREAK: HER PRE- Dave Fiske (davef@brspyr1.BRS.COM) CIOUS LITTLE POOCH IS POSSESSED!" Home: David_A_Fiske@cup.portal.com Headline from Weekly World News CIS: 75415,163 GEnie: davef
spolsky-joel@CS.YALE.EDU (Joel Spolsky) (09/28/88)
In article <37600006@pyr1.cs.ucl.ac.uk> william@pyr1.cs.ucl.ac.uk writes: | | I once typed "rm *.old" to get rid of some old editor backup files, | and came out as "rm * old". It sat there for a few moments, and then | said "old: file does not exist". Damn. echo "alias rm rm -i" >> /.login | | I used Televideo 910 terminals as an undergrad, and when you logged off, | the system cleared your screen. Once, I typed LOGOFF and then realised | I needed the data currently on the screen, so I hit CTRL-S hard just | as the first carriage returns came through to scroll the screen. And | the terminal just stopped - no logoff message, nothing - and nothing | that I did made any difference. It was definitely the terminal that | went, as I tried plugging different terminals into the same socket, | and power-off didn't help. I couldn't believe this, so I replicated the | situation and killed another terminal. | | Later on, I mentioned this to a friend who didn't believe it either, so | he promptly killed one and demoed it to someone else. Within an hour, | half of the college terminals were extinct which was amazingly popular | as it was the middle of the project season, and about a week later | the dead terminals were taken away and were replaced after a further week. Then somebody hit ctrl-Q and everything was fine, right? :-)
rosso@sco.COM (Ross Oliver) (09/28/88)
I work in the Tech Support department here at SCO and collect lots of interesting stories about customer mishaps. By far and away the best one is: A customer calls in and wants to know if there is a way to run his backups automatically at 1am in the morning. We explain to him how to set up a cron job to do just that. He goes away very happy. The next day, he calls back. Apparently, his backup did not happen. After going through the procedure with him again to make sure there were no mistakes, the tech support person is at a loss to explain the failure. Grasping at straws, the tech suggests, "Well, sometimes cron is a little tempermental, and you have to stop it and start it up again before it will recognize new jobs." "How do I do that?" the customer asks. "The easiest way is to reboot the system." "Oh, we've already done that." "Really?" says the tech. "Yeah, we shut down the machine at 5pm last night, and brought it back up at 8 this morning." ------------------- Ross Oliver SCO Technical Support
franky@dutesta.UUCP (Frank W. ten Wolde) (09/28/88)
In article <2135@stpstn.UUCP> aad@stpstn.UUCP (Anthony A. Datri) writes: > >"clear >/dev/ttyxx" has a way of scaring people as well.; > Try "clear >/dev/ptsxx" on an IBM RT PC in an ethernet network. [ this will certainly scare users because it will kill the currently running shell on that pts! ] -- ########################################################################## Frank ten Wolde | UUCP: ..!mcvax!dutrun!dutesta!franky Delft University of Technology | Faculty of Electrical Engineering | Section Computer Architecture | Delft | The Netherlands | ##########################################################################
bill@proxftl.UUCP (T. William Wells) (09/28/88)
Here's another, as told by one of my coworkers. (There are no names because I don't remember and wouldn't tell if I did. Also, no warranties on the accuracy of details, as this was told to me several years ago.) It seems that there was this system that had drums which spun about a horizontal axis. This drum also had a brake, intended to be used when the drum was (almost) spun down. Along comes Harry the Hacker, who finds a way to play with the I/O registers. He activates the drum brake ... and the drum, conserving momentum, causes the drum *housing* to spin, which, since the drum is right next to a wall, puts the whole thing *though* the wall! --- Bill You can still reach me at proxftl!bill But I'd rather you send to proxftl!twwells!bill
smryan@garth.UUCP (Steven Ryan) (09/29/88)
>I have a feeling that someone made sure that the paper was running low, because >the paper ran out and the printer responded as usual BY LIFTING THE COVER! >By the time anyone knew what was happening, it was too late and half >a dozen cups of coffee slid down the printer cover and splashed all over the >wall, floor, output listings, etc. At my previous job, line printers (512s) which did not open automatically were used for many years and then replaced with line printers (580s) which did. A rumour was that one of the operators had left an 814 disc pack on top of of 580 when it ran out of paper.
ssd@sugar.uu.net (Scott Denham) (09/29/88)
In article <1860004@otter.hple.hp.com>, gjh@otter.hple.hp.com (Graham Higgins) writes: > .....Some joker down in the computer room had used the > messaging facility to write on the 25th line the following message ... > > > "WARNING! Temperature overload! This terminal will explode in 30 seconds!" > We had a long string of console message jokers, ranging from some very much like that to my personal favorite, which was an OS/MVT operator action message that said something like: 02 TRAIN GOING BY OUTSIDE; PLEASE REPLY "F" IF FREIGHT OR "P" IF PASSENGER. (this of course done at the "system critical action required" level!) The same joker later figured out where to hook into the output spooler (HASP) to insert his own printer commands at will; he then proceeded to make regular use of the "raise cover" CCW on the 3211 printer.
jcw@jwren.UUCP (John C. Wren) (10/01/88)
I remember the days of old when people actually used Apple ]['s. I worked for a computer store that sold these machines, along with the Mountain Hardware Appliance Controllers. My favorite trick was to plug the Apple into the controller, manually turn it on, and load a driver that intercepted keyboard input. After so may keys were typed, a command would be send to the controller, and *poof* the machine would turn off. This would in- evitably confuse the salesman, and amuse the customer. Once they figured out the trick, they told me they would then be more impressed if I could make it turn itself back on. Never did get that one to work... ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- John C. Wren jcw@jwren J. Wren Enterprises -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
vanpelt@unisv.SV.UNISYS.COM (Mike Van Pelt) (10/01/88)
In article <2135@stpstn.UUCP> aad@stpstn.UUCP (Anthony A. Datri) writes: >I once had a user who had spend half an hour or so typing in a paper. >TO ROM BASIC (on a pc). The "Syntax Error" messages (or whatever) after >every line didn't seem to matter to him. That's like one of the CS 101 students on the Univac 1110 at the University of Alabama. He apparantly mistyped his @RUN statement and it was rejected. He then keyed in his entire BASIC program, ignoring the *NO RUN ACTIVE* message the system typed after each line. Until... >run *NO RUN ACTIVE* >list *NO RUN ACTIVE* >save "lab-1" *NO RUN ACTIVE* -- @FIN Mike Van Pelt, Unisys Silicon Valley PROGRAM NOT FOUND ...ucbvax!tolerant!unisv!vanpelt RUNSTREAM ANALYSIS TERMINATED vanpelt@sv.unisys.com
greim@sbsvax.UUCP (Michael Greim) (10/03/88)
Some years ago a friend of mine was coaching (monitoring?, you know what I mean,
I hope) a programminig course for "advanced beginners".
There were groups set up, where each member should write a module for
a not-so-small system. When the parts where fitted together naturally
there were a number of nasty bugs. So the groups started debugging...
One group came and said they could not find the error, if my friend could
help them. Ok. So together they looked at the code, inserted test commands,
you know the stuff.
After several days they had it narrowed down to one statement, like
(this is pascal)
if a = true
then ...
My friend pointed out, that this were nonsense. It was better to write
if a
then ...
After they had changed it, the program behaved differently, though still not
correctly.
Only then did he take a look at the declaration section of the module, where
he found :
const
true=false;
false=true;
-mg
--
email : greim@sbsvax.informatik.uni-saarland.dbp.de
(some mailers might not like this. Then use greim@sbsvax.uucp)
or : ...!uunet!unido!sbsvax!greim
voice : +49 681 302 2434
snail : Michael Greim, Universitaet des Saarlandes, FB 10 - Informatik,
Bau 36, Im Stadtwald 15, D-6600 Saarbruecken 11, West Germany
# include <disclaimers/std.h>hmm@laura.UUCP (Hans-Martin Mosner) (10/03/88)
And there was this guy on an overloaded 68010 UNIX system used in a course here.
He found out that the pascal compiler could be speeded up *A LOT* by just
typing "&" at the end of the command line.
He just could not figure out why the program still behaved wrong after
he fixed a bug...
--
Hans-Martin Mosner | Don't tell Borland about Smalltalk - |
hmm@unido.{uucp,bitnet} | they might invent Turbo Smalltalk ! |
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Disclaimer: Turbo Smalltalk may already be a trademark of Borland...leonard@bucket.UUCP (Leonard Erickson) (10/04/88)
In article <916@viscous> rosso@sco.COM (Ross Oliver) writes:
<A customer calls in and wants to know if there is a way to
<run his backups automatically at 1am in the morning.
<We explain to him how to set up a cron job to do just that.
<He goes away very happy. The next day, he calls back.
<Apparently, his backup did not happen. After going through
<the procedure with him again to make sure there were no mistakes,
<the tech support person is at a loss to explain the failure.
<Grasping at straws, the tech suggests, "Well, sometimes cron is
<a little tempermental, and you have to stop it and start it up
<again before it will recognize new jobs."
<
<"How do I do that?" the customer asks.
<
<"The easiest way is to reboot the system."
<
<"Oh, we've already done that."
<
<"Really?" says the tech.
<
<"Yeah, we shut down the machine at 5pm last night,
<and brought it back up at 8 this morning."
On the Tandy Model 200 laptop, you can actually get "silly" ideas like
thast to *work*!! "Off" is actually a low-power standby mode. You can
turn the 100, 102 or 200 off while they are executing a program and they
will resume where they left off when you turn them back on. (which allows
for a number of ways of freaking novice users.... :-)
But on the 200, they added a feature that allows you to have it "wake up"
and execute a program at a given time. When the internal clock reaches
the set time, it will take the machine *out* of standby and execute the
command. This can get *very* strange....
--
Leonard Erickson ...!tektronix!reed!percival!bucket!leonard
CIS: [70465,203]
"I used to be a hacker. Now I'm a 'microcomputer specialist'.
You know... I'd rather be a hacker."rpw3@amdcad.AMD.COM (Rob Warnock) (10/05/88)
In article <1086@bucket.UUCP> leonard@bucket.UUCP (Leonard Erickson) writes: +--------------- | On the Tandy Model 200 laptop, you can actually get "silly" ideas like | thast to *work*!! "Off" is actually a low-power standby mode. You can | turn the 100, 102 or 200 off while they are executing a program and they | will resume where they left off when you turn them back on. (which allows | for a number of ways of freaking novice users.... :-) +--------------- On PDP-11's with real core (not this modern RAM stuff!), there was a power-fail interrupt that gave you enough time to save critical state and go into a loop before the CPU quit working. It you diddled things right, you could take the power-on interrupt and restore your state and continue where you left off. In particular, the FOCAL/F interpreter contained the needed code,. Now the hack: I used to use this feature to implement a super-simple "mail" facility to a guy I once worked for. I was in college, and working for him evenings, and by the time I finished each evening he was long gone home. So when I had something really important to tell him first thing in the morning (when I'd be in class or asleep), I'd run a FOCAL program that paused for 10 seconds, then did a big "type" of my message. Then I'd type "go" (FOCAL's "RUN"), and power off the PDP-11, while it was executing the "pause". He'd come in the next morning and turn on the machine, and instead of getting a boot-up he'd get the "mail"... and the program would wipe itself out leaving no trace of how it had happened. I guess you had to be there. (*sigh*) Rob Warnock Systems Architecture Consultant UUCP: {amdcad,fortune,sun}!redwood!rpw3 ATTmail: !rpw3 DDD: (415)572-2607 USPS: 627 26th Ave, San Mateo, CA 94403
toma@tekgvs.GVS.TEK.COM (Tom Almy) (10/06/88)
In article <23134@amdcad.AMD.COM> rpw3@amdcad.UUCP (Rob Warnock) writes: > >On PDP-11's with real core (not this modern RAM stuff!), there was a >power-fail interrupt that gave you enough time to save critical state >and go into a loop before the CPU quit working. It you diddled things >right, you could take the power-on interrupt and restore your state and >continue where you left off. In particular, the FOCAL/F interpreter >contained the needed code,. BASIC also did this. I was once running a several hour long BASIC program when the power failed. Sure enough, when power was restored, the program continued to successful completion. I'd sure like to see systems do that these days! (Especially a *NIX system!). The system bootstrap code was contained in a ROM that consisted of a diode matrix on a circuit board. To boot the system from the halt state you would set the address of the rom in the switches, press load address, and then put the address of the boot device in the switches and put the run/stop switch in run. Since I had only one boot device, I moved some diodes around so that the device address was a literal instead of being read from the switches. Then I patched the system so that the power-fail interrupt was vectored to the bootstrap rom. Now when I turned the system off it would pfi to the boot routine, where it would be to reboot the system when power was restored! This gave me convenient operation much like todays personal computers. (Of course, If I ran basic, I needed to hit load address and run because the vector would have been changed...). Tom Almy toma@tekgvs.TEK.COM Standard Disclaimers Apply
ehr@ecsvax.uncecs.edu (Ernest H. Robl) (10/07/88)
In article <4041@tekgvs.GVS.TEK.COM>, toma@tekgvs.GVS.TEK.COM (Tom Almy) writes: ... [information about old systems being able to save programs in core when power failed and being able to restart those programs when power is restored] ... > I'd sure like to see systems do that these days! (Especially a *NIX system!). > ... [additional text deleted] ... > > Tom Almy > toma@tekgvs.TEK.COM > Standard Disclaimers Apply Actually, Tandem systems, as part of their fault-tolerant architecture, have battery protection of RAM as a standard feature. After power interurruptions of up to numbers of hours, the system resumes right where it was when the power went off. You do have to reset the system clock, since no processing takes place while the power is off. -- Ernest -- My opinions are my own and probably not IBM-compatible.--ehr Ernest H. Robl (ehr@ecsvax) (919) 684-6269 w; (919) 286-3845 h Systems Specialist (Tandem System Manager), Library Systems, 027 Perkins Library, Duke University, Durham, NC 27706 U.S.A.
dc@gcm (Dave Caswell) (10/09/88)
In article <4041@tekgvs.GVS.TEK.COM> toma@tekgvs.GVS.TEK.COM (Tom Almy) writes:
BASIC also did this. I was once running a several hour long BASIC program
when the power failed. Sure enough, when power was restored, the program
continued to successful completion.
I'd sure like to see systems do that these days! (Especially a *NIX system!).
Try a Spectrum.
--
Dave Caswell
Greenwich Capital Markets uunet!philabs!gcm!dcfrank@zen.UUCP (Frank Wales) (10/11/88)
In article <4041@tekgvs.GVS.TEK.COM> toma@tekgvs.GVS.TEK.COM (Tom Almy) writes: >In article <23134@amdcad.AMD.COM> rpw3@amdcad.UUCP (Rob Warnock) writes: >>On PDP-11's with real core (not this modern RAM stuff!), there was a >>power-fail interrupt that gave you enough time to save critical state >>and go into a loop before the CPU quit working. > >I was once running a several hour long BASIC program >when the power failed. Sure enough, when power was restored, the program >continued to successful completion. > >I'd sure like to see systems do that these days! (Especially a *NIX system!). Well...when power failed to our building a few months ago, it took about a quarter of a minute for our standby generator to kick in and start supplying enough juice to get things going again. At that point, our HP 9000/840 restarted, waited for all the disks to get back up to speed, synced them, checked them, then carried on as if nothing had happened. Battery-backed RAM [16MB] may not be quite the same as core, but it ain't half useful sometimes, especially when the OS supports it. [HP-UX! Ra, ra, ra! HP-UX! Ra, ra, ra!] (Now if only the terminals could have preserved the contents of their screens too...) -- Frank Wales, Systems Administrator, [frank@zen.co.uk<->mcvax!zen.co.uk!frank] Zengrange Ltd., Greenfield Rd., Leeds, ENGLAND, LS9 8DB. (+44) 532 489048 x220
jec@nesac2.UUCP (John Carter ATLN SADM) (10/12/88)
In article <5529@ecsvax.uncecs.edu>, ehr@ecsvax.uncecs.edu (Ernest H. Robl) writes: > In article <4041@tekgvs.GVS.TEK.COM>, toma@tekgvs.GVS.TEK.COM (Tom Almy) writes: > ... [information about old systems being able to save ] programs in core when power failed and being able to ] restart those programs when power is restored] ... ] ] I'd sure like to see systems do that these days! (Especially a *NIX system!). ] ... [additional text deleted] ... ] ] Tom Almy ] ] Actually, Tandem systems, as part of their fault-tolerant ] architecture, have battery protection of RAM as a standard ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ ] feature. After power interurruptions of up to numbers ] of hours, the system resumes right where it was when ] the power went off. You do have to reset the system ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ ] clock, since no processing takes place while the power ^^^^^ ] is off. ] -- Ernest ] Battery backed RAM, but............. No battery backed clock chip and crystal oscillator to keep time? Somehow I picture a site needing a "fault-tolerant" system as being a site that's probably also concerned with having things done at very specific times. -- USnail: John Carter, AT&T, Atlanta RWC, 3001 Cobb Parkway, Atlanta GA 30339 Video: ...att!nesac2!jec Voice: 404+951-4642 The machine belongs to the company. The opinions are mine.
wyle@solaris.UUCP (Mitchell Wyle) (10/17/88)
In article <1417@zen.UUCP> frank@zen.co.uk (Frank Wales) writes: >In article <4041@tekgvs.GVS.TEK.COM> toma@tekgvs.GVS.TEK.COM (Tom Almy) writes: >>In article <23134@amdcad.AMD.COM> rpw3@amdcad.UUCP (Rob Warnock) writes: [...stuff deleted...] Using the Boyer-Moore theorem prover on our network of 12 Crays, I was seconds away from finishing a statistical text analysis algorithm which derives the true conceptual meaning of all Indo-European languages and dialects, effectively solving all performance problems in information retrieval systems. The forces invading from the Zuerich international airport chose that moment to cut all power to the University, and mortar shells were falling outside our building seconds later. Luckily, our solar-powered, diesel-backed, quantum-predicting energized deflecto-modulators kicked in femtoseconds BEFORE the power-failure (elements of the system move faster than light), saving all 17 Terabytes of Cray Core and all 831 Terrabytes of index files my program was using. With projectiles exploding and whistling ever closer, I decided on the final corrections through my brain-implant interface and ran for the bomb shelters, knowing that the DWIN (Do-What-I-Need) User-interface would finish cross-compiling my system for all processor architectures from 4-bit Casio-watches and HP hand-helds up through Connection Machines CM-2s. The autonomous tanks started using their armor-piercing rounds on the upper floors of the computing center but... -- -Mitchell F. Wyle wyle@ethz.uucp Institut fuer Informatik wyle%ifi.ethz.ch@relay.cs.net ETH Zentrum 8092 Zuerich, Switzerland +41 1 256-5237
rsvp@eleazar.dartmouth.edu (R. Scott V. Paterson) (10/19/88)
In article <482@solaris.UUCP> wyle@ethz.UUCP (Mitchell Wyle) writes: >In article <1417@zen.UUCP> frank@zen.co.uk (Frank Wales) writes: >>In article <4041@tekgvs.GVS.TEK.COM> toma@tekgvs.GVS.TEK.COM (Tom Almy) writes: >>>In article <23134@amdcad.AMD.COM> rpw3@amdcad.UUCP (Rob Warnock) writes: >[...stuff deleted...] > >[more stuff deleted] > >Luckily, our solar-powered, diesel-backed, quantum-predicting energized >deflecto-modulators kicked in... >-Mitchell F. Wyle wyle@ethz.uucp Are those the 1986 solar-powered, diesel-backed, quantum-predicting energized deflecto-modulators? If so, those were recalled about 6 months ago but, I'll take 'em off your hands if the price is right. R. Scott V. Paterson Dartmouth Class of 1990 Kiewit Computation Center Systems Operator rsvp@dartmouth.edu rsvp@dartcms1.bitnet
wrs@pupthy.PRINCETON.EDU (William R. Somsky) (10/20/88)
In article <482@solaris.UUCP> wyle@ethz.UUCP (Mitchell Wyle) writes: > ... Luckily, our solar-powered, diesel-backed, quantum-predicting energized > deflecto-modulators kicked in femtoseconds BEFORE the power-failure > (elements of the system move faster than light), ... That reminds me of the Sidrat 4200 machine we used to have. (Came in a big blue box, about 1 meter x 1 meter x 2.5 meters.) It had a tachyonic line-voltage monitor that would generated a "power-failure-immenent" interrupt two seconds before the actual failure to allow time for the machine to bring itself down gently. One day, one of our system programmers got the idea to make the power-interrupt interrupt-handler REALLY rock-solid. He designed everything into it he could think of to protect the system: core dump for later retrival, full disk backup onto holographic media, etc., etc., etc. He even included a final disconnect_power_mains routine ("to protect the power supply from line transients"). Since the machine had full tensor architecture, this could all easily be done in the alloted two seconds warning time. In fact, it took just 0.978 seconds. So, a full second before the power- failure, the computer was backed-up, shut-down and POWERED-DOWN. Of course, the line-voltage monitor detected this power shutdown two seconds before it happened and initiated a power-failure interrupt THREE seconds before the real power failure. But the power shutdown from that one was detected as well, and ... The net result was that the machine shut itself off a full hour before it was even turned on! ------------------------------------------------------------------------ William R. Somsky Physics Dept ; Princeton Univ wrs@pupthy.Princeton.EDU PO Box 708 ; Princeton NJ 08544
snoopy@sopwith.UUCP (Snoopy T. Beagle) (11/01/88)
In article <1279@nesac2.UUCP> jec@nesac2.UUCP (John Carter ATLN SADM) writes: |] Actually, Tandem systems, as part of their fault-tolerant |] architecture, have battery protection of RAM as a standard | ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ |] feature. After power interurruptions of up to numbers |] of hours, the system resumes right where it was when |] the power went off. You do have to reset the system | ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ |] clock, since no processing takes place while the power | ^^^^^ |] is off. | Battery backed RAM, but............. |No battery backed clock chip and crystal oscillator to keep time? |Somehow I picture a site needing a "fault-tolerant" system as being a site |that's probably also concerned with having things done at very specific times. Perhaps they are concerned with getting accurate numbers for the long running benchmark they were running when the power went away? :-) _____ /_____\ Snoopy /_______\ |___| tektronix!tekecs!sopwith!snoopy |___| sun!nosun!illian!sopwith!snoopy