Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!gamma!epsilon!zeta!sabre!petrus!bellcore!decvax!decwrl!glacier!SU-Russell!knight
From: knight@SU-Russell.ARPA (Bob Knight)
Newsgroups: net.rumor
Subject: Re: Computer Horror Stories
Message-ID: <224@SU-Russell.ARPA>
Date: Tue, 25-Feb-86 16:25:01 EST
Article-I.D.: SU-Russe.224
Posted: Tue Feb 25 16:25:01 1986
Date-Received: Fri, 28-Feb-86 07:43:45 EST
References: <1322@decwrl.DEC.COM>
Reply-To: knight@SU-Russell.UUCP (Bob Knight)
Organization: Center for Study of Language and Information, Stanford
Lines: 25

And then there's the old 24xx tape drives from IBM.  Turns out if you turned 
the maintenance clock off on them, they wouldn't work.  More than one site I
worked at had this happen.  One was 75 miles from the nearest IBM office.
The CE came down and worked the problem for about 4 hours before thinking 
about the clock.

The same site once had an operator who would dismount an application's
disk pack WHILE THE APPLICATION WAS RUNNING and mount a to-be-run application's
pack in its place.  Needless to say, the operating system in question didn't
check the VOLID on the new pack when it spun up.  However, after the first
two times the operator did this, he was fired and the operating system 
modified.

Under TENEX, Dan Lynch put in a hack to the scheduler so that a wheel could
suck up all of the CPU cycles if he/she so wished.  Made monitor assemblies
go MUCH faster, since MACRO basically looped in one core page and (almost
never) page-faulted.  Some operators were running a system dump one night,
and we fired up such an assembly.  The tape drive stopped dead in its tracks
-- normally it really blasted along.  The operator saw the lack of activity,
the wheels turned ("Oh, the tape's stopped moving, DUMPER must be done), 
and then he went over to the drive and unloaded the tape.  Looked really
puzzled when he saw two systems programmers rolling on the floor about ten
feet away.

Bob