Computer sprinkled with exotic chemicals produced super-problems, not super-powers
- Reference: 1715931007
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2024/05/17/on_call/
- Source link:
This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Adam," who told us of the adventure he endured when, as a student, he was hired to do what he described as "some computer work at a local hospital."
The job involved a little light programming, but most of it was the very dull chore of coming in late at night to collect printouts and distribute them to various places around the hospital.
[1]
The hospital's machine was a Digital Equipment Corporation minicomputer of some sort, and "lived in the basement along with a half a dozen line printers." That computer and its peripherals were very loud, so the mini-monster was located behind glass doors in the bowels of the site. Adam often sat outside of that area to avoid the constant printer noise.
[2]
[3]
One night, as he sat and waited, Adam noticed that the noise of the machines has stopped altogether.
"This was not normal as there were a lot of overnight jobs to print so I entered the computer area to check." The printers were indeed not living up to their name.
[4]
"Then I noticed the rain," Adam told [5]On Call .
Rain? In a basement?
"It turned out the computer room was beneath the hospital's chemistry lab," Adam wrote. And the drains from that lab ran directly over the top of the computer.
[6]
Liquid that Adam assumed was water dripped along a rail into the top of the minicomputer, and landed just where its exhaust fans were located.
"The water didn't drip anywhere else, just into the machine," Adam recalled.
"I killed power to the beast and called security. A guy showed up with a big piece of plastic to put over the computer," Adam recalled. That plastic, he later learned, was "a shroud taken from the hospital morgue." Which kind of made sense since it was pretty obvious the machine was dead.
"I was later shown one of the boards taken out of the computer," Adam told On Call. "It was really pretty, like a gift package. Turns out the outflow from the chem lab had all sorts of interesting metal salts in it which hit the hot boards and immediately turned into sparkly stuff."
[7]Help! My mouse climbed a wall and now it doesn't work right
[8]Your trainee just took down our business and has no idea how or why
[9]Support contract required techie to lounge around in a $5,000/night hotel room
[10]Techie saved the day and was then criticized for the fix
The Register finds that profoundly disappointing. Everything we've been taught about late night institutional accidents involving unknown chemicals, big machines, and electricity suggests that this incident should not have ended with a dead computer.
Adam should have entered the room and been struck by an eldritch spark that fused his consciousness with the computer's newly sentient circuitry, raised to miraculous life by the drip of chemicals. The resulting hybrid organism would then devise miracle cures for the plucky and deserving patients of the hospital.
Or perhaps it would commit mayhem that put unfortunate patients in the hospital. Whatever it got up to, the Adam/DEC entity would endlessly struggle to reconcile its human passions and machine constraints.
On Call's screen agent is already optioning these ideas around Tinseltown. Your correspondent has suggested he’d like to be played by [11]Travis Fimmel . A guy can dream, OK?
Back to Adam, who told us that he asked if he could have one of the sparkly boards as a souvenir. "No such luck," he was told: "They were all being held as evidence for the upcoming court case!"
Have you seen a stranger computer than the one Adam beheld? Or a weirder accidental cause of machine death? To share your story [12]click here to send On Call an email and we may make you the hero on a future Friday. ®
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[7] https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/26/on_call/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/19/on_call/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/12/on_call/
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Mentioning JANET reminds me of my days working as IT support at a university. I did support for one department's IT (as it was computing, we had some extra requirements), so wasn't hit directly by the fallout, but the science department had a very large microscope which has some kind of water cooling. Which leaked. Right above the computer room for the rest of the university. This being the 90s, disaster recovery and resilience didn't really figure highly in people's minds nearly as much as "how cheaply can we build this, given we have a uni budget".
Most of the IT for the rest of the uni was out for about a week, really glad I didn't have to do anything with the recovery to be honest...
The upcoming court case ?
Why ? The hospital goofed, the machine died. Did they think that they would sue to get a new one for free ?
I doubt they could blame the contractor in any way. The glass doors were added for silence, so hospital management knew where it was going. If they knew that, they should have also been aware that there were drains with various liquids coming down there. The contractor hardly could.
I think this is all the hospital's fault. They didn't give all the specifics, or they moved the chemistry lab after the computer was installed, or they just didn't think the problem through.
I don't see how it could be the contractor's fault.
Re: The upcoming court case ?
Where did you get the notion that it was the contractor being sued?
It may well be the plumber who installed that drain. Or a chemist disposing of hazardous waste incorrectly (more likely to be a disciplinary than court, but...)
Clean up
As it was a DEC machine, did they use a VAX hoover to clean up the mess?
Re: Clean up
That joke sucks.
Reminded me of this: https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/vaxorcist.html
DEC,... VAX,... but not immune.
On call?
I can't help but think that there's a "Who, me?" story waiting to be told from the floor above.
Reminds me of the time ...
when I was working as a scientific programmer at the Department of Medical Microbiology, and a PhD student decided to dispose of forms filled out by volunteers in an experiment by dousing them (the paperwork, not the volunteers) with alcohol and burning them in a steel container (dustbin) in the lab, rather than just using the shredder. This would have been OK if it had been done under a fume hood, but wasn't really ideal when carried out right underneath one of the sensors of the fire alarm.
No computers were harmed in this experiment. Some red faces were observed, however.
Drains...
We had a similar incident at a previous employer, although not as serious.
Having moved buildings the space allocated to be the computer room was actually the former gents' toilet, with all the plumbing removed of course. They also removed a wall which was a bit of a problem since it supported the main water tank* for the offices, but that's a different story!
What we didn't know about was that the "north light" type roof had a gulley drain that also passed over the computer room, and that maintenance of this drain wasn't being carried out. Inevitably the drain eventually became blocked and overflowed, right above our comms/server cabinet and just missing the AS/400. Fortunately we discovered this before damage was done, and as above large sheets of polythene (not from a morgue, thankfully) were deployed. Disaster was narrowly averted but maintenance of the drain was considerably improved.
*We wanted the tank moved well away but budgets didn't allow, so we simply told management we would not be responsible for any damage or downtime caused by it leaking or failing.
Or contrawise
I'm sure that I've posted this before on here but that was likely many years ago.
When working on a major industrial site in North East England I was introduced to the PDP-11/34 running employee medical records under Digital Standard Mumps (DSM) based in the site medical centre. Physically located above the blood drainage channel in the (decommissioned!) site morgue.
[1] It was explained to me that when the site was buuld in the 1950/60s, it was too far away from the local hospitals' A&E (Emergency Room) locations and so major accident casualties needed to be immediately treated on site - not everybody made it unfortunately. By the time of my visit in the mid-1980s road improvements meant that hospitals could be reached much more quickly and so the trauma unit on site was closed and the need for a mortuary removed.
[2] I also understand that at one time the company's site across the river used to have a "KPI" based on the number of deaths/month due to onsite industrial accidents. (I'm sure that wasn't the term for it at the time but it fits with more recent terminology.) Now how do you feel about the efforts of your local 'elf and satefy team?
Gutter
I used to use 'ovens' to test rugged boards, that could swing the board under test between -45C and +85C at high speed, involving a lot of liquid nitrogen and heating elements respectively. (The same computing board could be used in a tank left off overnight in a North Norway winter, or be used in a helicopter in a Gulf State in summer, and often with what was considered to be only one step behind the leading edge desk-top or server processor and without fans!)
One of the ovens' nitrogen feed would cause a lot of condensation, even though it was, at least superficially, covered in the same thick lagging as the others.
The solution was to fit a length of gutter under that feed running down to a bucket, from where it evaporated before the bucket ever filled.
Simple and effective is often right.
Hybrid organism
an eldritch spark that fused his consciousness with the computer's newly sentient circuitry
DEC made wonderful computers, but this sounds like a grim fate. Best case the computer might be an Alpha or a VAX, but the environment sounds more like a PDP/11. Imagine spending the rest of your life running RSTS/E, unable to understand anything but the word "PIP".
The JANET Point of Presence for the east of England used to be [1]protected by a shed as the computer room was built beneath a roof garden!
[1] https://fanf2.user.srcf.net/hermes/doc/misc/shed/