You can’t be serious

We actually introduced our 17 year old daughter to Airplane! last night. She wasn't sure what to expect but when she saw the magazine rack label said 'Whacking Material' she burst out laughing. She liked the film.

"And don't call me Shirley"

Big Daddy?

Few are going to get that reference, but I am not crabby about it.

Few are going to get that reference

Yes, the reference is rather hard to find, like looking for a needle in a giant haystack...

Inspired insight. Have one of these ---->

He had to wrestle with the controls.

It's hard to resist punning the hell out of this, I'm wrestling with my conscience here

From the 1980's, watched opened mouthed as Royal Navy matelots manually dragged a PDP system out of the onshore DC I was about to enter and loft it onto a flatbed truck. They tied it down, put a canvas over it and set off. I suspect it was not functional when it arrived and was offloaded to whatever destination it was going to.

I did raise my concerns with the person who was hosting me on site but they just shrugged their shoulders and said it was not part of their IT domain.

DEC “PDP” systems came in a lot of different families and sizes. If this was the 1980s, it was very likely it was obsolete and decommissioned anyway.

And, knowing PDPs, would probably still have booted even after being dropped from that flatbed at its destination.

Before I left the Army I went to a cold place on a comms exercise. The generators were put onto ISO pallets, covered in plastic sheet and shipped over. When the generators were switched on the majority failed to start, having ingested an amount of salt water. This was pointed out before they departed the UK but it wasn't the persons job who was shipping them to make sure they worked on arrival, just to make sure they arrived.

Actually, [1]you can , and live to tell the tale.

[1] https://guide.michelin.com/en/hotels-stays/istanbul/four-seasons-hotel-istanbul-at-sultanahmet-7293

Wowee! Those pics (if you follow Ido's link) are awesome.

Feels a bit off topic (bit of advertising?) , but the former HMP prison at Oxford Castle is now a Malmaison hotel and still has the look of the prison landings.

I remember that someone wrote a nifty script that went checked something every second (for example if a file has changed, notify me so I can do something). This was a great little tool and soon every one was using it. Soon every one (100s of people) were using it on the server. People left this running overnight when they were not at work.

The system got slower and slower as more and more CPU was used. The root cause was this little program. When they set the default interval between checks to 10 minutes the CPU problem went away, and a check every 10 minutes was fine for the end users.

Shouldn't mechanical systems like that have some sort of fuse equivalent, a sacrificial component that would break and stop the system before anything really expensive went pop?

If it's designed to go 0-100% nothing would happen before then anyway. Mechanical fail-safes can be tricky to make, set, calibrate and maintain.

For excessive vibration, it's far easier, more accurate and more reliable to have a transducer monitoring conditions. The associated electronics will determine whether things have gone out of control. After all, the operator might have become incapable for medical reasons.

I forget the system name, it may even have been bespoke in house but a modest workshop I had a summer job at had a fancy conveyor (rubber cords running in grooves) system to dispense and distribute prepicked trays of components to the assembly workstations. It used small pneumatic pistons to push the trays from one central conveyor on to a perpendicular one and, as the system aged, the creaky pistons stopped doing their job reliably. In response to the grumbling, someone volunteered that the regulators could be adjusted for a little more power. After lunch, there was quite a commotion when trays of components started flying through the air. It seems that someone on another distribution line was upset at not getting their line adjusted too and had copied the procedure without understanding the method. They'd simply wound the regulator fully open and the result helped a lot with the post-lunch sleepiness.

Was the software for the simulator fluent in Jive?

The first several times I got to play in an RAF flight simulator it had the pneumatic (hydraulic?) Cockpit, both fixed wing and Heli cockpits were available,but the interior view was provided by a tiny camera on an arm that moved throughout a rather large physical scale model of the Welsh mountains. I was given to believe that the army also had a not dissimilar setup for tank training.

I think Tom Scott did a video just last year about a hobbyist-built submarine simulator that used a similar setup, with the camera in a well-maintained pond. Very neat systems.

This was also the method for the original Concorde simulator. I visited Filton in 1991 and had a go in the simulator (take-off, circle, land at JFK airport) with the more recently installed computer generated display. I only needed a little help with the landing.

The computer room was mostly taken up with the older physics simulator part of the system (complete with paper tape readers) with all of the graphics being handled by a single rack in the corner.