News: 1600413310

I fondly remember the years when static electricity was a real problem.

A whole CIT-Alcatel telephone exchange would go wonky whenever a cleaner polished the black perspex doors of the 19 inch racks.

Since then, we have learned how to do grounding and bonding properly and there is even a Mil Spec and three different and conflicting handbooks on static control.

Does anyone but me remember populating memory cards with RAM while standing naked in a bath-tub full of cool water? Sounds like over-kill to avoid static, but try to remember that my first 32K of RAM set me back around US$2,000 in 1978 (I *think* that was the price ... might have a trifle more), and the early chips were dreadfully sensitive to static. Yes, 32 kilobytes.

Not quite that era, or that extreme!

I do remember buying my first PC (486DX66) and speccing the memory be doubled (to 8MB I think) which cost me something like £160. Around the same time I remember reading an article in a computing magazine that made the ludicrous suggestion that the author could foresee a point in the future where the cost of memory might come down to as little as £1 a megabyte!

soooooooo middle class ;o) i only had a 486DX33 with 4mb

My first "modern" PC was an AMD "586" with 16MB RAM. I upgraded it to 32MB EDO (Extended Data Out?) RAM, replacing the FP or "Fast Page" RAM it shipped with . I remember when you booted it, it would cheerfully announce "EDO RAM Installed!", assuring you that you were on a fast track to the future and all was right with the world..

Yeah.

I remember having a few beers then writing that section of the tech manual.

Didn't think anyone would take it seriously, though.

You're all too young!

My first own PC was an 80286 with the RAM upgraded to 1MB from the standard 512KB. I acquired an RLL* HD controller and suitable disk which pushed the storage to a whopping 32MB.

For those who don't know these altered the recording density across the drive which gave a 50%+ increase in capacity.

Way back when in my banking days, when mainframe terminals were the size of a small desk, we had a records clerk who carried enough static to trip the overload switch. They might have found the problem sooner if they'd listened to all of us who complained of getting nasty shocks off her and had witnessed metal handrails sparking as she went to touch them. New (less cheap and nasty) carpet and a change of footwear sorted it.

I remember our PDP 11/34 in the early '80's used to have it's disk drive opened up about once a month or so and the tech pull the platters out and wipe them down with a cloth wet with alcohol to clean them. Usually after he was called due to a head crash. Reliability? What's that?

My bet is the roller blade guy was jerking the cabinet rather than it being a static issue. Especially at UCSD, given the humidity there a couple of thousand feet from the ocean.

The RA82s I worked with on VAXes in the mid 80s were, I believe, something of a revelation as they worked reliably!

We had a PDP 11/45 but fortunately that was never switched on.

Biggest problem with with RA drives as I remember was the drive belts snapping other than that I don't remember any big issues, early RD series were very prone to failure from memory until they got earthing issues sorted.

In the 1980s, I looked after a Systime 5000E (repackaged PDP11/34A with 22 bit addressing bolted on) which had CDC SMD drives rather than DEC drives.

We payed an external data company to clean the platters of all of the disk packs about once every 6 months (normally during the academic vacations). This was mainly because we would regularly switch disk packs, as we ran 2 OSs (RSX11/M and UNIX Edition 6 and later 7) at different times of the week.

The guy came in with a machine that would not only allow him to clean (with solvent and special large lint free giant cotton bud like tools) but also check the balance and warp of the platters to try to stop head crashes. I think it earned us a slight discount on the system maintenance cost.

When they came in, they wanted the space they would work in to be deep cleaned, and insisted that the doors and windows were shut while they were working.

Our biggest bug-bear was heat. It was meant to be an office environment machine, but we found it required more ventilation than we could give it, and we anxiously watched the thermometers during the summer. Difficult decision to either open the windows and let dust in, or keep them shut and watch the temperature. They bean counters would not allow us to buy a window mounted AC unit, which would have been the best solution.

I worked for Systime in the '80s (up until the last but one big redundancy loop).

I was at the meeting where we were shown the first CDC 90meg SCSI half-hight drive by tbe CDC rep "Dave".

Washing machine sized hard drives vanished that day. :-)

I worked as a temp replacement test tech on the RK06 production line in Westfield, MA for two summers while in graduate school. I recently ran across my documentation binders.

For an EE just about to enter the workforce, those two summers were a great education in practical engineering and what happens on the production floor. I even got paid!

A friend on mine used to work in an office where one of the workers had a German Shepard as a guide dog.

It used to love grabbing the back of a chair and dragging it (and its user) through a doorway and onto the top of the fire exit stairs.

Only defence was to give it a dog treat.

I've been grabbed by a few office dogs in my time! Normally at the Xmas party! And they just wanted a treat from me as well!

Had to be --------------->

"a German Shepard as a guide dog"

For you Brits, that's an Alsation.

This cross-pond translation brought to you free of charge.

Ah, thanks. We call it a German Shepherd. --->

p.s. I think the name changed because something happened in the past which made the Germans unpopular in the UK. Can't quite remember what though...

I think I can help you out here. I'm pretty sure this was because of the Euro '96 Semi-Final. It was at the same time that Dachshund became draught excluders.

They changed it back about 40 years ago, and it's generally interchangeable these days.

Don't mention the war. The first one.

We call them German Shepards as well. Alsation dogs are actually a separate breed now (although derived from the German Shepard breed back in the dim and distant pass).

Yes I know about the "official" name change ... but my Brit friends still call my critters Alsations when they are visiting.

As for the "separate breed", Shirley you're not talking about the designer dog sometimes called the Shepalute? These things exist for one reason, and one reason only: Separating fools from their money.

https://www.google.com/url?q=https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Shepherd

Just to correct the weird left-pondian spelling.

Dogs from Alsace so Alsatian.

"For you Brits, that's an Alsation."

Translation: Alsatian.

Really shouldn't let BOFH train the guide dogs.

It used to love grabbing the back of a chair and dragging it (and its user) through a doorway and onto the top of the fire exit stairs.

Ooooooohhhh... a BOFH-trained doggo! Hey, Simon! Here's an idea on luser control!

No maybe trained by the PFY.

If it were BOFH trained, then surely it wouldn't have stopped at dragging them to the TOP of the fire exit stairs. It would have been trained to gently push them over the edge ...

Maybe that happened if it wasn't bribed suitably rewarded.

Bored of chair races one evening we removed the wheels from a swivel chair, sat the youngest technician on it and gave him two of the heaviest lab PSUs he could hold at arms length. We span him as fast as we could and then he pulled in the PSUs to his body. Luckily the tech and one of the PSUs survived intact and we were never tempted to try again.

Something similar - sit on a chair, the other operators pushed said chair, chair + occupant shoot down a corridor between tape racks.

Great until one guy didn't bother to try and stop before reaching the door at the end of the corridor. Lets just say the door came off worse....

Luckily for us the damage wasn't discovered until a few weeks later when we were off shift...

Reminds me of something a old BOFH told me back in PFY days.

In terms of the cost of DR, never underestimate the cost saving a speeding techie with a boot load of DLT tapes in their car.

Yep. Never underestimate the bandwidth of the fedex truck. Ping times suck though!

When I was at Stanford, early one Saturday morning a Grad student drove to Berkeley on his motorcycle & came back with tapes of the over-night build of 3BSD. Our Professor, visiting from DARPA for a couple weeks/months (a dude by the name of Cerf, you may have heard of him), wondered how the hell our VAX had the latest version of BSD already running (10AM-ish), when the Switched56 connected source code system hadn't completed the download of the source, much less started to compile it.

Biker's answer: "My motorcycle's latency might be sub-par, but it still has a much higher bandwidth capability than your network!". Cerf's reply? "Nice hack!" ... A variation of this quote ("station wagon full of mag tape") is often attributed to Tanenbaum in 1996, but it was a fairly common meme around 1980.

Indeed. It was short session with a pencil and a notepad that saw me driving a server 90 miles up the road rather than squirting the contents of the discs down the wire.

Been there, seen it, done it.

Boot load of reel to reel mag tapes in a beat up Fiesta moving from an old DC to a new DC. Great until I had to pull up suddenly at a rather notorious roundabout. Queue a boot load of mag tapes deciding to try and move to the back seat for a better view.

Oh, I miss those days.

An occasional client had offices on Banbury and Swindon both running SCO on tower servers.

On-site work was on Saturday mornings when the business wasn't running. I drove down to Banbury and he picked up the Swindon server and brought it to Banbury. No faffing about with tapes.

In relation to another of today's stories, he used fax to take orders. Online support was by means of him disconnection the fax and plugging a modem into his fax line and me dialling that on a Nokia Communicator.

How times change. My first thought when seeing the heading was another tale of the office cleaner unplugging something.

Just waiting for Dyson to make the reverse journey and build computers...

another tale of the office cleaner unplugging something

A very traditional tale in hospital ITUs!

... making the rounds at SLAC in the very early 1980s. I never did track down the truth behind it, but it is true that quite a few folks were quite into the then new RollerBlade fad, and were known to use them to get around the SLAC campus, both inside and out.

Did a warehouse automation project once where the site was so vast the owners gave us bicycles to get around on. Unfortunately we fell behind schedule, so the grumpy owners took the bikes away to punish us - and of course we then fell even further behind schedule having to walk everywhere.

Could Ethan's problem roller skater have been causing an induction loop as he whizzed round the VAX? Magnets moving at speed. Like I said, almost certainly not the case but a fun idea.

-> is approaching

google youtube for "guy on office chair going downhill" and enjoy.

How much of a bandwidth upgrade is Rollernet over Sneakernet?

Ah, Sneakernet.

Way back when The Internet was still capitalised and web applications were still new and exciting, a Large Government Department and its third-party suppliers did a pretty good job of putting a large part of their functionality online, to the advantage of them, their users and the taxpayer in general. As with all new systems, however, there were wrinkles. In the publicity for the new way of doing things great play was made of how this use of technology was the very sharpest point of the cutting edge of public administration. What was less publicised was the non-functional bit that was a bone of contention between the department and two private-sector suppliers which, while the contractual wrangling was going on, wasn't going to get fixed anytime soon. In the meantime, the shiny whizzy technology was reliant on a PFY (or equivalent) downloading an Excel spreadsheet, exporting it as a CSV file onto a floppy, walking down two flight of stairs to the data hall and manually uploading the data onto the database every morning.

Surprisingly, Rollernet has less bandwidth than Sneakernet!

Both have the same packet size (give or take), and Rollernet is significantly faster ... but it turns out that there is a routing issue ... Sneakernet almost always uses the least-cost route available, but Rollernet almost always takes the most scenic route.

Very much the same thing, we had a customer with a PDP that would randomly crash, usually around a certain time, no end of engineering, software visits etc. In the end after much shouting from customer there was a team on site for the day to fix the issue.

The problem usually manifested itself first thing in the morning but of course this day it didn't until the office junior flew in the door late for work and with one swift flick put the kettle on and tripped the computer system. All systems were on clean supplies those days but it appears no one had noticed that someone had a dded a kettle. It didn't happen every time hence the apparent randomness.

Similar issues could be had anywhere with a decent radio transmitter (air field/farm office).

a little operator education was dispensed (possibly with the aid of a long, sharp stick)

I'd have just greased the corner of the VAX cabinet...

I had to take the back off a new laptop the other day. I'm familiar of course with M.2 drives, but was surprised to find the machine's drive was now postage-stamp sized with the rest of the M.2 form factor being a piece of plastic to take up space. I'm thinking it would be fun to take it back in time and show it to a DEC engineer, maybe set it on top of one of the disk packs.. Of course he or she would be much more impressed by the time travel, as they should be.

The storage density achieved is still a bit unnerving to me (queue "sufficiently advanced tech - magic" comparisons, that's magic as in sorcery not in "The Collecting" (or was it "Gathering?"), and then it should be "Magic [TM]")