chris@hwcs.UUCP (05/26/87)
This story is second-hand, and I am afraid that I can't supply all the corroborative details I should like to, but ... An ex-colleague of mine had previously worked on an early (I think ICT, one of the fore-runners of ICL) system that had a random-access card memory (really!). This consisted of a bank of cards; when one was selected, it would drop into a reader path, be carried round some convoluted track, and eventually drop back into its original slot. Of course, it was read-only. The problem was that some nasty little piece of wire crossed the return path whenever a new card was read; if another card was returning at the time, it would be neatly sliced in half. Inevitably, someone managed to work out the timings to carry out a complete destructive "memory erase" operation. -- Chris Miller, Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh chris@cs.hw.ac.uk <EUROPE>!ukc!hwcs!chris chris@hwcs.uucp chris@uk.ac.hw.cs