How to get a computer get stuck in a lift? Ask an 'illegal engineer'
- Reference: 1691134151
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2023/08/04/on_call/
- Source link:
This week meet "Tyler" who wrote to inform us he once worked as an illegal engineer.
A word of explanation is perhaps in order. Tyler's actual title was "Customer Engineer" and he worked at IBM, in the fine state of Texas.
[1]
"The designation is/was actually illegal in Texas," Tyler told us, as in the Lone Star State "all persons called Engineers actually have to be both graduated and accredited." This [2]FAQ suggests he's right – which explains why he told us IBM changed the job title to "Service Rep" about 1985 or so, "after legal threats from the state."
[3]
[4]
But we digress. When Tyler was a Customer Engineer/Service Rep, he often found himself working with the IBM 402 – an infamous accounting machine that ingested punch cards and spat out useful financial calculations.
Tyler told On Call the 402 was commonly called "pig iron" due to its daunting dimensions and mass.
[5]
"The machine was huge – six feet long, four foot high and wide – an almost solid chunk of metal parts weighing in the tons."
And sometimes it needed to be moved.
"A very entertaining book could be made from tales of such relocations – and mishaps – while being swung into windows by a crane, pushed over ramps built between rooftops of buildings, or hefted up a long set of stairs by a gang of grunts who had no idea of the danger they were in if they were a member of the group that was pushing rather than pulling," Tyler told On Call.
[6]
One such move he witnessed saw the team tasked with shifting a 402 consider using the stairs. That route was rejected as too narrow, and featuring too many 90-degree corners.
"The 402 sat in the office foyer for a couple of days as 'experts' were consulted."
The resident experts were actually the building's "janitor and an ancient maintenance man."
Those worthies decided the building's elevator could do the job – if the 402 were turned onto one end.
"Unfortunately, enough muscle was found to perform such an awesome feat," Tyler recalled. "Once the pig iron was firmly sitting on the floor of the lift, a man climbed on top of the machine to 'pilot' it – his task to push the proper button then wait until the doors reopened to the proper floor." On that floor, people would wait to retrieve the 402 and place it in a new home.
Tyler told us that, while the experts had correctly appraised the volume of the elevator, they hadn't consulted the "very prominent plaque that spelled out its maximum load."
Said plaque specified the lift was rated to carry a few humans – but not a machine of sufficient heft to earn the name "pig iron."
The folks waiting for the elevator to arrive therefore waited. And waited. Then waited some more.
And then started to look for the elevator car, and the 402 it contained.
[7]The choice: Pay BT megabucks, or do something a bit illegal. OK, that’s no choice
[8]Douglas Adams was right: Telephone sanitizers are terrible human beings
[9]Bizarre backup taught techie to dumb things down for the boss
[10]Nobody does DR tests to survive lightning striking twice
"A nervous check of the basement brought the welcome news that at least it had not descended at speed to the nether regions of the building," Tyler wrote. Some extra investigation revealed it was halfway between floors.
Where it had stuck.
Tyler told us the ensuing chaos involved "fire departments, rescue squads and news reporters" as the chap riding the 402 in the elevator was retrieved.
Next came the long and expensive process of erecting a temporary hoist on the roof to extract the 402 and the elevator car from the elevator shaft.
Tyler's no spring chicken, so admits his memory isn't what it was. But he's as sure as can be that he never saw the manager responsible for the 402's journey after the day of its fateful move.
Have your attempts to move computing machinery hit roadblocks? [11]Click here to send your story to On Call and we may feature it on a future Friday. ®
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[2] https://pels.texas.gov/lic_faq.htm
[3] 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=44ZMzMR9U0D4IbQ-6EyPdAewAAA4Q&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
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[7] https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/28/on_call/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/21/on_call/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/14/on_call/
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/07/on_call/
[11] mailto:oncall@theregister.com
[12] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
We had a similar incident
At my old work, when someone was getting a PC an admin person would set it up, then wheel it to your desk on a trolley (big CRT monitors were heavy!).
They'd use the lift if it was to another floor. The incident happened when the power cord fell off the trolley and inbetween the doors. The doors closed on it and the lift ascended for a bit without issue then the UK plug on the end of the cord pulled between the doors but wasn't able to get through and acted as an anchor so the lift couldn't move any more and hit a safety cut out.
So the poor admin lady was stuck in the lift which wouldn't now respond to any commands and had to be rescued 30 minutes later. In this case they just had to lower the lift and open the doors and reset the electronics.
But from then on she refused to deliver PCs and people had to collect the trolley themselves and maybe risk the lift.
How was "Pig Iron" originally installed?
I would have imagined running the installation in reverse would have worked a liitle better.
I assume the building was neither constructed around the 402 nor that it materialized tardis-like nor Mr Scott beamed it down.
Might have been cheaper for IBM to leave it where it was and de-license it with an inbuilt thermite facility.
Re: How was "Pig Iron" originally installed?
Well the building might not have been constructed around the 402, but I've seen situations where the computer was lifted in through an unfinished wall. Once the wall was done, it's not (easily) going anywhere.
Disclaimer: my mum worked on 402s/403s/419s and I still have her manuals.
They were "programmed" with jumpers on a 18" (or so) plugboard. She told stories of people laying the plugboards flat, pushing the jumpers out and undoing all that work. I have some of her used worksheets showing the jumper wiring.
Even after 40 years in the business myself, I still can't grok what she did or how that worked. I really wish she was still around to answer questions about it.
Pig iron?
Angry Bird iron incoming!
I used to work in a 3 storey building. Only one lift. This only went as far as the 2nd floor, and was at the other end of the building. The reason the lift only went to the 2nd floor was because the building was originally designed with 2 floors, and they added bits of a 3rd floor where they needed extra rooms. So, parts of the building had 3 floors, but most if it had two.
My then boss was working in the office when printer turned up. This was a Laserjet 5Si, a rather large and heavy network printer. We had also ordered the 2000 sheet paper drawer. There were three techs working in the office. Me, my boss, and a third tech. No idea where the third tech was, but I was at lunch. We had some colleagues in an office on the 2nd floor. What the boss should have done was asked the driver to deliver the printer there (it had a coded lock, but we all had the code), and waited for everyone to get back from where they were.
Even if that weren't an option, his boss's wife was one of the secretaries, and she worked in a large office with the other secretaries on the 2nd floor. He could have put it there. He didn't do either. He decided to help the driver carry the printer up the stairs.
Not saying they were linked, but within a few months, he took a couple of days off for back pain. When it didn't subside, he went to the hospital, and they said there was a prolapsed disk. He was off for months..
I remember a similar incident when a VAX 11/780 was being delivered to our office. Not quite in the same class as "pig iron", but it still weighed a respectable 3/4 ton. No-one wanted to hire & wait for a stair crawler, which might have been be problematic anyway given all the corners in the stairwell. The installation crew realised that if they uncrated the system in the lobby it would just fit sideways through the doors of the lift car, with about 1/2 inch to spare all round. They did check the weight, and found that they would exceed the lift's maximum capacity by about 50%, but assuming that it had at least a 2x safety factor decided it should be OK. No-one wanted to be in the lift with the beast, of course, and there wasn't room anyway unless they crouched on top, so they reached through the doors, pushed the button for the desired floor, and sprinted up the stairs to meet it.
The lift did make it to the floor OK, but what they hadn't allowed for was that the lift's position sensors were calibrated for normal loads. With the overload (and presumably a slight cable stretch) the car stopped about 1" below the floor level, leaving them with the problem of how to lift 3/4 ton of computer up 1", when they couldn't get to anything except the side panel that was facing them...
They did eventually get it out, to the great entertainment of all passing.
Presumably the lift failed its next inspection.
Unrelated, of course
With apologies to Phil Collins
I have no fear
Being an illegal engineer
Re: With apologies to Phil Collins
Don't apologise to Phil Collins, after everything he's inflicted upon humanity!
Getting stuck in a lift is no fun
It's Friday, after hours. Our IT office is on the 3rd floor and normally I take the stairs because the lift is one of those hydraulic things and thus rather slow. In those days I was quite fit and could steam up the stairs from the basement to the top floor in the time the lift took to get just past ground level as personnel (who established that measurement) had learned to stay well out of my way when I did one of those runs because You Do Not Impair The IT Manager :). How long ago "in those days" was will become clear in a moment.
This time, my father in law came to pick me up as he was in the area, so, not thinking (also partly because it never had a problem before) we take the lift down. Which gets stuck a short while later. This is a basic lift, so no phone, and an alarm that only sounds in the building. It's Friday after hours, so the building is otherwise empty. Uh oh. It's weekend..
This was in 1991 or so, so mobiles were not that ubiquitous, 2.5G and WiFi had not even been invented yet, analogue and in general [1]as unwieldy as a brick but I had just bought my own first, [2]a NEC P3 , which was far nicer and could invisibly fit inside a jacket, even with its long range antenna fitted, which was my habit as cell phone towers were not that widespread in London yet and signal at home was not great.
This office was in Craven Street (since then all converted into residential premises), which due to being next to Trafalgar Square and Whitehall had at least decent signal, so even in what is theoretically a metal Faraday cage I could thankfully get a signal and thus managed to call the fire brigade. Nervously, because in those days the batteries already didn't last a whole day so it had only 25% left (I'd already used my spare that day). They took half an hour to get to the building, somehow got through the front door without breaking anything (I assume they have good lock picks?) and located us. After that it was a matter of going to the pump in the basement and manually vent the oil back into the reservoir until we got to a level where we could exit.
It would have been a rather long weekend otherwise, and even that short time convinced me I'd not get into that situation again. I don't care about heights, but being in a closed box with no exit makes me nervous (for instance, you would not have been able to get me into that Titan submersible).
Since I've made a habit of automatically checking lifts for fitted communication if I'm in an empty building. I still prefer the stairs anyway, but if you're on the 22nd floor it gets a tad harder upwards, and due to knee surgery it's no longer as much fun..
[1] https://www.mobilephonemuseum.com/phone-detail/8500x
[2] https://www.mobilephonemuseum.com/phone-detail/nec-p3
"he never saw the manager responsible [..] after the day of its fateful move"
Of course not. The manager was promoted to another position in a different branch of the company.
Which he left to get into Government.
He was obviously highly qualified.