SLSW2@cc.usu.edu (Roger Ivie) (01/18/90)
In article <1990Jan15.181808.1352@newcastle.ac.uk>, Brian.Randell@newcastle.ac.uk (Brian Randell) writes: > What had happened was there had been a break in a sewer pipe - a pipe > being fed by all the toilets in the large multi-story building whose > ground floor housed the computer room. The sewage gradually backed up, > and then overflowed into the hole in the ground housing the fan, and > then into the fan itself, so as to be distributed evenly and > efficiently - for a while at least - around the whole computer! My story isn't that dramatic. The university here used to have a Burroughs B6800. One day it went down in a fashion more severe than its normal yoyo mode. It turned out that a rat had crawled into the fan on one of the disk drives and had been spewed all over one of the disk packs. =============================================================================== Roger Ivie 35 S 300 W Logan, Ut. 84321 (801) 752-8633 ===============================================================================
acm@grendal.Sun.COM (Andrew MacRae) (01/20/90)
The company I worked for 10 years ago was a big user of PDP-11/34s. About that time DEC began selling replacement front panels. Instead of nifty toggle switches and lights you could have a keypad (octal of course) and an LED readout. We had put in a call for maintenance on a band printer. The tech who came out decided to replace the old front panel with one of the new ones as long as he was out at our shop. This was on a Friday afternoon, late, and he didn't bother to test it out afterwards. After all, all you have to do is hook up a few wires, right? On Monday morning when we powered up that machine, we heard funny clicking and ticking sounds, then the whole machine went dead. After pulling the front panel off we found the problem; the guy had run the wires for the panel *through* the fans. Hey, it was the shortest distance, and the blades weren't moving anyway. When we powered up, the fan blades had started chopping away at the wires until they were cut, at which point everything shut down. Oh yes, he hadn't gotten around to fixing the printer either.