ark@research.att.com (03/09/91)
A long, long time ago [before 1970], IBM was about to introduce a new disk drive that had higher storage density than any it had built before. This disk drive came in multiples of eight, stacked two high, four wide, and was immediately dubbed the "pizza oven" by its users. Anyway, the new drive was introduced with much fanfare. A few weeks later, its first customer had their first head crash. Then their second, and soon after that, their third. The chagrinned IBM service people bundled up the entire drive and took it back to their lab in Poughkeepsie, or Kingston, or wherever. There they replaced all the heads, put in brand new packs, and let it run. It ran for more than a month with no problems, so they carted it back to the customer site. They left the heads alone, put the customer's packs back in, and let it run. A few weeks later, the heads started crashing again. They repeated the whole process, but again the heads would not crash in the lab. Finally, someone got the bright idea of examining the crashed heads under a microscope. They found them clogged with some hard resinous substance, which they subjected to chemical analysis. The substance turned out to be the glue from the quality control stickers. These stickers were affixed during final inspection to each disk pack sent to customers, but not to the test packs they used in the lab. After a few weeks, the glue dried out and started flaking off; some of the flakes eventually found their way into the heads and caused the crashes. -- Edited by Brad Templeton. MAIL your jokes (jokes ONLY) to funny@looking.ON.CA Attribute the joke's source if at all possible. A Daemon will auto-reply. Jokes ABOUT major current events should be sent to topical@looking.on.ca (ie. jokes which won't be funny if not given immediate attention.) Anything that is not a joke submission goes to funny-request@looking.on.ca