Lapping the computer room in record time until the inevitable happens
- Reference: 1659342614
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2022/08/01/who_me/
- Source link:
Our tale takes place in the 1990s and our hero, whom we shall call "Ben" (for that is not is not his name) was one of a group tasked with tending to the needs of a VAX 11/785 lurking deep within a bunker.
The VAX 11/780 range turned up in 1977, and the 11/785 was introduced in 1984. Hot stuff for its time, but now relatively elderly and in need of round-the-clock pampering by teams of sysops. "Its only job," Ben told us, "was to run a program associated with national defense."
[2]
"Many a sysop had burn marks from the saturated core main PSU loading 8" floppies into the PDP 11 boot computer," he went on. "So many had thumped [so many] incantations on the console teletype that most of the letters were no longer visible."
[3]A character catastrophe for a joker working his last day
[4]Know the difference between a bin and /bin unless you want a new doorstop
[5]Beware the fury of a database developer torn from tables and SQL
[6]If you fire someone, don't let them hang around a month to finish code
The pay was good, but the work (mainly cleaning tape drives, running backups and performing system integrity checks) was deathly dull. Off-site materials weren't allowed into the computer room, meaning the team had to amuse themselves with whatever was contained therein. "A lot of Minesweeper and Patience was played," confided Ben.
And then there were the chairs. Chairs on wheels. So of course a chair racing league was started. Such things are compulsory, no?
[7]
[8]
"Naturally," said Ben, "the course wound through the clean air-conditioned computer room as the hard floor allowed a high-speed section to the course."
All went well, and the long shifts spent in the company of the VAX were broken up by high-speed circuits as techies tried to rise up the league rankings.
[9]
Until the inevitable happened.
"One night," said Ben, "in a desperate attempt to undertake on the final lap, one of the sysops tried to do a slingshot manoeuver using a support pillar in the computer room."
"The pillar had one notable feature. The room's emergency stop button."
[10]
Almost immediately silence fell. Everything spun down over a five second period. There was no air-conditioning whir, no fans, nothing. "You could almost hear the 11/785 sighing with relief," said Ben.
"Then the red telephones started to ring..."
"And the defcon light pole clicked up a level."
Worried readers should be reassured that this took place very much after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War. Peace reigned and, Ben told us, the change in color on the defcon pole simply meant that something had happened and was being investigated.
The stop itself was recorded as an accident, but not as a result of a cunning chair-racing manoeuvre. "Some vague details about leaning to fill in a check list was entered into the incident log."
The bosses admonished the sysops with a warning that more care was needed, before dispensing praise for getting everything back online.
A cover was added to the stop button a week later. And the chair racing league? Scrapped – suddenly it seemed twiddling one's thumbs in between tape changes wasn't so bad after all.
Has anyone not been tempted to do some surreptitious scooting when presented with a chair on wheels? What was the outcome? A sudden silence or catastrophic crash? Confess all with an email to [11]Who, Me? ®
Get our [12]Tech Resources
[1] https://www.theregister.com/Tag/Who,%20Me?/
[2] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2YuekWYfDjVchIX93ydECHQAAANY&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[3] https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/25/who_me/
[4] https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/20/who_me/
[5] https://www.theregister.com/2022/05/23/who_me/
[6] https://www.theregister.com/2022/04/04/who_me/
[7] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YuekWYfDjVchIX93ydECHQAAANY&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[8] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33YuekWYfDjVchIX93ydECHQAAANY&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[9] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YuekWYfDjVchIX93ydECHQAAANY&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[10] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33YuekWYfDjVchIX93ydECHQAAANY&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[11] mailto:whome@theregister.com
[12] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Super Mario Chair!
One place I worked (an HMRC warehouse full of forms - P45s, tax returns, etc) did in fact have a Playstation hidden behind some pallets, but they mostly used it for a FIFA league, and raced pallet trucks down the main aisle.
Obligatory XKCD
[1]Compiling
[1] https://xkcd.com/303/
Re: Obligatory XKCD
"New kit initializing" works well. Management types are afraid to ask.
Always remember
just why we need Molly Guards
http://catb.org/jargon/html/M/molly-guard.html
(imagine the havoc if Molly had been on a wheelie chair!)
Re: Always remember
And when Molly grows up?
Many moons ago I took my daughter to SLAC on take your kid to work day. At the ripe old age of 9, she had been there many times before and knew the ropes, but I figured she deserved a day out of school.
She told me as we were walking in that it'd cost me ten bucks for her to not push any buttons. I gave her the money.
On the way back out, I told her that it'd cost her ten bucks for me not to tell her mother she was running a protection racket. She made a face and paid up ... and promptly told her mother as soon as we got home. They both still laugh about it :-)
Green energy
This is what baffles me. Why the idle time of IT people is not used to generate energy? Imagine human sized hamster wheels in the computer room, where they could dump any excess energy they may have and generate much needed electricity?
Re: Green energy
Those giant wheels aren't terribly efficient, a lot of energy goes in just making them move, friction on all the rollers they need to hold that much weight.
Do it with exercise bikes and have a high-score chart, IMO.
Re: Green energy
"Why the idle time of IT people is not used to generate energy?"
There is no idle time for IT people. What you see as being idle is usually what we call "processing", or sometimes "testing", which often involves quite a bit of "hurry up and wait".
Sometimes it is heavy thinking about how to fix your problem, usually long before you even know you have the problem.
Many, many moons ago, in a now-defunct games developer, we once received a large and unexpected delivery which had been bought for us by a large corporation that we were developing for. On opening the large crate, described on the packing sheet as 'toys', we found a large SGI Crimson deskside, with Reality Engine graphics. (It also had a US power supply, which ended up costing an arm and a leg to get officially swapped out for a UK one, and caused all manner of hiliarity when the engineer turned it on and within seconds filled the room with acrid smoke which turned out to be due to his accidentally leaving one of the polystyrene packing chips stuck in the coil inside the new transformer.
Anyway, it was large and it had wheels... the warehouse where it had been delivered was raised, and there was a sloping corridor from there that led to the IT office, so of course I wheeled it to the top of the ramp and jumped on, and rode it down the corridor, straight past the IT office and carried on until reaching a dogleg in the corridor further down where it thumped into the wall.
Afterwards, it then sat, forming part of my desk for quite a while - the gesture was nice from the company who gave it to us, but since they didn't also give us the very expensive license for Alias Wavefront, which the graphics lot used for doing the kinematics on their existing machines, we didn't actually have anything to do with it, and they didn't have room at any of their desks to replace the existing Indigo2s that they were using.
Of course the inevitable happened ...
... being engineers, we motorized them. Naturally. We had a stock of 12V Gel cells (used to keep the sonalerts beeping in the event of power failure, and long since disconnected as bloody useless). We also had quite the collection of scrapped 1960s & '70s computers with perfectly good motors and pulleys and etc, Steering was rudimentary, mostly friction of one sort or another. Driven wheels came from old, unused carts that used to be for pushing bunches of punch cards and attendant printouts from place to place. You get the idea ...
Also naturally, "Who needs brakes‽‽‽" ...
One of my comrades managed to spin out in the sweeper (fastest part of the "track"), and put his foot out to stop his progress with the main door to the room. He missed, hitting the drywall next to the door. And put his foot through it. And then through the sheet on the outside. Just as a corporate director was leading a group of VIPs through.
The VIPs bust out laughing, and the director just shrugged & decided to see the funny side. Fortunately,
Nobody got fired, but we were strongly advised to keep our extracurricular activities off campus.
We also discovered the contractor had skimped ... the sheet-rock was 1/4", not fire-rated 5/8".
They didn't create a virtual chair race instead?
Bummer!