News: 1623396701

I remember one strange box that had a light. If the light was on - it meant there was power, and it was turned OFF. Turn the box on and the light went off. The logic was as follow

If the box was working then you ignore the light

Else If the light was off - there is no power, turn on the power

Else the box was turned off, turn it on.

Obvious once you think about it - one light - 3 states!

i've worked with people that think like that.

That's why internet upstarts where so successful, doing things that people like that hail as impossible or not needed etc but normal people think is actually useful.

put 2 LED's in the box, 1 for power, 1 for function.

you don't then need a PHD in awkward to understand whats going on.

So, a warning light then?

I have heard rumours of people building research kit with the useful knobs hidden away and the front panel populated with mostly functionless knobs. This kept the people who did not keep their hands in their pockets 'amused', while allowing the designer/builder to keep it in a known state.

I once worked on an environmental control system that replaced the office thermostats with a computer-controlled system that was much more energy efficient and which gave better temperature control.

The workers rebelled - they were sometimes too hot, sometimes too cold (the logging showed the temperature never changed) and they wanted their thermostats back. Now!

They got them. The workers were happy. The thermostats were never connected to anything...

front panel populated with mostly functionless knobs

Lockdown has been tough

In Rock'n'Roll, we use to call that the "DFA"*

If a punter helpfully suggested that we might need "more treble in the bass" (or whatever), we simply agreed, and adjusted the DFA accordingly.

* Does Fuck All

http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/magic-story.html

I was installing some spotlights on the front of my Ford Capri back in the day, and whilst holding the two lights in my hands, my brother connected one cable to the car, and they lit up.

I was wearing rubber soled trainers, and wasn't in contact with any other part of the car, so am at a loss to explain how this worked...

Co-axial cable .........

We once sold a fully loaded Pentium II (weird slot thing) with all 4 ram slots full, it never booted up the first time, after few reboots it was managing.

So I showed the customer how to reset 3 times after ram was initialised (or counted for no apparent reason) and voila!

With 3 rams it worked fine but the insisted.

An old PC got scrounged to act as a file server and wouldn't boot because the big hard disk took too long to do it's own power on self test and wasn't ready when the BIOS wanted to boot from it. It was fixed be adding more RAM. The RAM test then took long enough to allow the drive to get it's act together before the BIOS tried talking to it.

> "I had, and still have, no idea what that box did," he admitted, "apart from giving a sense of satisfaction and a powerful placebo effect."

One building I worked in had an office that was long and somewhat narrow. There were continual arguments between the people at one end and those at the other as to what temperature the single thermostat, situated in the middle of the room, should be set to.

This escalated to "management" (who had their own, air-conditioned suite somewhere else entirely). After a particularly sweaty summer week, the staff came into work the following Monday and found to their delight, TWO extra thermostats - one at each end of the room.

Problem solved! Situation defused! Heat, cooling and best of all ... control .

Nobody thought to tell the occupants that all three thermostats had absolutely no effect on the office temperature, which was set for the whole building in the control room. But the staff were satisifed that they had been listened to.

The number of variations on this kind of story is bewildering.

It's almost as if someone in Manglement is reading El Reg !

The opposite was the server room where I once worked. Two AC units with their own thermostats on the wall. And big signs on both of them telling you to ensure they are set to the same temperature otherwise they just fight each other...

A site I worked at had two offices with individual AC units, but whose thermostats were somehow connected to the other office. User in office A decides that she is too cold, and turns the heat up, making office B too warm, where the user turns the heat down. Eventually, office A is near Absolute Zero, and office B is practically on fire, and neither user is happy...

After a few months of this, somebody figured out the issue, and the contractors were recalled to fix the problem.

The box might have been something that translated print data to plotter data - most likely AGL (A Graphics Language)

I reckon that the destruction of the Amazon rain forest was kicked off by my initial attempts to use HPGL to get decent plots out of test gear in the 1980s. There's a Farside Cartoon with a pic of a boys bedroom and a poster on the wall saying something like "First Trousers, Then Shoes". Mine would have read "First Select Pen Then Pick Up Pen"

If you reset the plotter, it sometimes fixed the problem but took a couple of minutes to run through the whole process. People would try in the meantime and declare it not fixed. Forcing them to wait long enough to lever up the floor panel and press the redundant box meant they waited long enough between attempts to reset the plotter.

Some Burroughs mainframes had FE Terminals, used by the engineers during preventative maintainance time. They looked very much like electronic calculators and, coincidently, they were installed during the time that Burroughs had an incentive scheme that handsomely rewarded those who sold electronic calculators.

The engineers were instructed to make sure that they used their terminals on every visit, even though they weren't in any way connected to the computer.