News: 1595833748

But not one inspired by the managers butt.

A manager was checking the delivery of a new Sun E450 (it was a while ago) when his butt encountered the power switch of an AlphaServer 4100 running a whole bunch of stuff. Yes the front cover had been removed (we'd been playing with disks).

It was the 1970s and the end of a busy nightshift in an ICL mainframe computer room of a Datasolve computer bureau (anyone remember those?). The line printers were kicking up a row. The tape decks chugging back and forth, the EDS60 disks spinning and clicking, card readers doing what they did.

In comes the caretaker and his vacuum. All of a sudden.

Total silence. Power fail?

All eyes focus on the caretaker, rapidly reversing towards the door still cleaning with his now dead vacuum.

He had hit the emergency stop button with his elbow.

The guy was a walking disaster: once scrapped a whole bin of punch tape that took hours to create because he thought it was rubbish.

Those were the days.

Those were the days that taught an entire industry about the usefulness of clear plastic guards on on/off switches, manager's butt or no.

What is surprising is that there still is kit today that is sold without any guard on the on/off button.

We're not done reading this kind of story, I'll wager.

"computer bureau (anyone remember those?)"

These days they're called cloud vendors. Nothing's new.

Dunno, the phrase "spurious times of the day" is a new one on me - which times are those exactly? 25:61 PM ?

Remember using their Mainframe bureau in Sunbury

Back in the 1980's security guard had to make his rounds and log his presence at various points around the site by inserting a physical key into a body-worn time-stamper. For the computer room, the key was chained to a wall behind a VAX11-750 and its accoutrements, leaving only a small alleyway to squeeze through to get to it. To aid his squeezing he steadied himself on the front of the VAX, only to press a reset button........ in the middle of an overnight run.

I have mentioned this one before.

Some years ago I was involved in an EU funded project to put learning centres throughout SE Scotland in various small businesses, libraries and learning establishments. This involved installing a server, workstations and (if required) structured cabling and network kit.

In one Uni in Edinburgh I was shown the cabinets in the server room and pointed to the space where the new server was to go. Except in this case read Dexion racking for cabinets and basement for server room.

Now, I am not a particularly tubby guy but I struggled to manhandle an IBM Netfinity server down the gap between the wall and the back of the "cabinets" as they hadn't left a huge amount of space. Part way down my journey along the wall I felt a click on my backside. Looking round, I saw that the geniuses had put a PDU with a honking great rocker switch on the back of the racking which I had managed to switch off with my arse, turning half of their kit off.

I pushed my backside against the switch again to turn things back on, dumped the server and left in a hurry. On my way out I heard one of the admins wondering what was going on with their DNS servers.

When I was working for a very large electrical engineering company, building motor control gear for a well known maritime organisation, I also caused mayhem with part of my anatomy. One of the units was in Test, and the testers were doing a heat run, running the equipment at full chat whilst the observers from the customer looked on. I had gone into Test to take some photographs for the Instruction Manual that I was preparing (I was in Technical Manuals Department at the time) and I had to scrunch myself up into one corner of the roped-off area in order to get all of the cabinets in shot. Suddenly everything went dark, and the high pitched whine of the invertors wound down the scale to inaudibility. Cue furious shouts from the Test Engineers, I had inadvertently backed onto one of the emergency shutdown buttons that were located at various points around the department, and that had shut off all power to the Test area and surrounding parts of the building. A complete morning's heat run ruined, and the customer's observers were distinctly unimpressed. The heat run had to be rescheduled for the next morning as it had to start from cold. Needless to say, I was NOT allowed into Test whist a heat run was being performed on that or any further equipments.

It's not so bad when it's one of your own, but working on the Cambridge Science Park in the early 80's, we had lots of VIP guests (and I mean very ). Margaret Thatcher and Prince Philip to name but two.

[1]A page with links to some photos

A lot more embarrassing when one of their entourages' buttocks disrupted the demo.

Not the [2]first time I've mentioned this.

[1] https://pghardy.net/lsl/lsl_photos.html

[2] https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2020/02/03/who_me/#c_3966698

Thanks for reminding me of a company that managed to keep reinventing itself as technology changed. And had a great bunch of people working for it.

Did you ever identify the guilty - err - member?

the PDP-11/70 could also support MassBus. This was especially useful if you had any RP06's (256Mb) disk drives attached.

A wonderful system for its time. It could support 48 users (using VT102's or the like) with three 16 port interfaces (DH11 http://gunkies.org/wiki/DH11_asynchronous_serial_line_interface) without much effort.

I got to know the innards of them very well during my time at DEC.

I once worked for a firm where the owner had a thing about equipment being left on and "wasting money".

It was perfectly normal during the Winter to emerge from an office into a pitch-black corridor or stairway with the switches at the far end. Everyone used to carry pocket torches for this reason.

The IT and telecom equipment all had labels over their sockets saying they must be left on, but he usually managed to turn off at least one server a month.

Evidently he worked on the principle that if there was nobody there, it wasn't being used.

I once worked for a firm where the owner had a thing about equipment being left on and "wasting money".

I've found security guards particularly bad for this. When I worked for the MoD all our labs and offices had emergency power off buttons outside by the door and the night patrols would wander along hitting them, sometimes even when you had an "experiment running overnight, leave power on" sign. I also know of one university that shall remain nameless where a security guard turned off power to a lab for the Christmas break. It was the lab full of freezers containing expensively obtained ice core samples.

We have two closets that have light switches at 'butt' level, we're constantly apologizing for butting off the light...

ICL3930 with those little toggle switches to put drives in read-only mode. Seen those get tagged by people brushing past, causing all sorts of mayhem. Eventually fixed by ICL by replacing the plastic face panel with one that had a raised plastic bump where the switches were.

Oh, and the old 2900 series operating stations with the reset button on the front (push up to reset). Saw someone catch that with a sleeve on his suit. That system was down for days (an ICL2976 I seem to recall)!

In a previous company, many years ago, they decided to move to agile development. We all went on agile training, were given a lovely whiteboard and a whole stack of Post-It notes. We wrote our stories/tasks on the Post-It notes and stuck them in swim lanes on the whiteboard. Only problem was the Post-It notes weren't quite sticky enough and fell down during the night, to be cleaned up by our over zealous cleaner!

Useful things for stopping important buttons being pressed by accident.

Naturally the key is never anywhere to be found when you actually need it (usually it's hiding in an old floppy disk storage box that seem to lurk in server rooms built outside of the last decade and a half).

Fun times..

Coat icon because you always check your coat for keys first..

"Coat icon because you always check your coat for keys first.."

Always check your zip first.

But Zip disks are quite obsolete these days.

Getting my coat...

Key-related topic drift...

I worked in the Newbury offices of Cabletron, and we had a lab with all sorts of kit in it to simulate a network for the Spectrum software my team and I was supporting. We kept the lab locked because kit would be raided for urgent customer requirements ( i.e. rapid replacement of broken kit on site). But the key sometimes took a while to come back or we'd havr to go and find it.

Until the day the 8 x 4 metal door sign with "Lab" on it no longer stuck properly. So I used a split ring to attach the key to the sign, and funnily enough the key was always promptly returned from then on.

I was working for a local authority a decade and a half or so ago when some workmen doing stuff to the computer room door hammered things so hard they triggered the emergency cut out. Most of it was on a UPS but some of the windows stuff fell in a heap. Ten minutes of frantic invocation of init 0 followed by a nail biting half an hour or starting it all back up again.

I wasn't in the meeting where the facts of life were explained to the workmen though the BRB was relocated after that.

I worked on the directory enquiries system used at the MOD in the 90s. We had a call one day to say the system wasn't working, and after having no success diagnosing it over the phone, I went in to central London to have a look myself. After getting in to where the server was located, I asked if anything had changed recently and was told that some light building work had just been done nearby. When I looked at the server, it was unplugged, and plugged into its socket was a kettle.

Comparatively minor compared to turning off servers, but one large open plan office in which I used to work had the light switches right next to the door release button, and they looked very similar. It was a frequent occurrence for the lights to go out immediately followed by a thump (and often cursing) as somebody (usually management) tried to exit the office and walked into the door. You would think that it was something an individual would do only the once, but...

Someone who was developing products that had to be tested in a vacuum (well low pressure), kept finding the was a blip in measurements during the evenings. They solved it by having "an evening in with Pizza" to watch what happened. The cleaner came along, are carefully plugged into a free socket and turned it on. The problem was that short cleaner had to reach over "the bell jar" containing the experiment, and touched it. This was enough to let in a small amount of air. The problem was easy to solve - just move the bell jar along the bench.

First cleaner story where they don't unplug something, and the solution is so easy... For future proofing you could probably rig a "cleaner's" socket at the front of the bench.

"I made a little plastic box to fit over the disk drive buttons and all was well again."

A true BOFH would have solved it differently - a few drawing pins epoxyed to the relevant surface, a connection to the cattle prod, a loose floor tile over an inexplicable void leading down to the basement...

I worked on the assembly line for these during a couple of summer breaks from grad school. We didn't have those newfangled "internships" back then, so I made my own.

I ended up as an summer fill-in assembly line technician at DEC's Westfield, Massachusetts plant, doing initial test and bringup of newly assembled RKO6 drives, which were quickly double-densitied into RKO7s. They had nice lighted, front-mounted buttons, and were mounted in a rack at the appropriate height. Top opening, of course, and about 1/2 the size of a washing machine (the bottom of the rack was empty, it only served to bring the drive up to a convenient height)

Thanks for the memories...it was a very educational two summers, well worth the time.

I remember my first experience with a PDP-11/70 at DEC's educational services facility in Kanata, Ontario, Canada. The year was 1982 and we were attending a one-week class on DT-07 and PCL-11 (two UNIBUS technologies). It was lectures in the morning and labs in the afternoon. We all had different machines and two of us from Bell Canada were assigned a PDP-11/70. Every lab began the same way: power up the machine then toggle in your diagnostic boot strap via the octal front panel switches. On the day of the last lab, the instructor, Gilles Marcel, remarked "I notice you guys toggling in your diagnostic program at the beginning of the lab". I responded with "Yes, that's right". Then he continued: "The PDP-11/70 you are using has core memory (read: magnetic core memory) so the diagnostic only needed to be input once". Well I was gobsmacked. He had watched us toggle in the diagnostic every morning but said nothing. We thought we were computer hot-shots up until that experience :-)

I worked on the 11/70 back in the day. The lights and switches were wonderful diagnostic aids. Unfortunately DEC introduced the lightless and switchless remote access front panel which you drove via the console device. Fault finding then became much more difficult and in extreme circumstances we resorted to putting back the "old" lights and switched front panel to get a grip of what was going wrong.

Back in the 90's, some of my coworkers didn't take the whole on-call thing too seriously. Oh, they did carry the pager, and they did stay close to a computer they could use to login. What they did not necessarily do was stay *sober*.

One of them got a page when he was well on the way to completely shitfaced. As his favourite drinking hole was about 100 metres from the office, he went there to fix whatever it was. And went into the server hall, stumbled, caught himself on a rack... which he overturned.

I'm fairly sure the outage report to the users was sanitized.

And no, this was not the last time he was drunk when on call.