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From: falk@sun.uucp (Ed Falk)
Newsgroups: net.rumor
Subject: Horror stories
Message-ID: <3344@sun.uucp>
Date: Mon, 10-Mar-86 22:02:39 EST
Article-I.D.: sun.3344
Posted: Mon Mar 10 22:02:39 1986
Date-Received: Wed, 12-Mar-86 22:41:27 EST
References: <1060@loral.UUCP>
Organization: Sun Microsystems, Inc.
Lines: 30

Where I used to go to school, the electronic music lab down the hall had a
PDP-11/04.  that's right, "04".  The machine was a quad-width unibus and
the cpu was all low-level ttl.  It had a cassette drive, some D/A converters
and one of those big disk drives that you don't often see attached to a
microprocessor.  Anyway, the computer-knurds who joined the lab so that they
could play with the computer could never get the idea that you have to
be careful with computer hardware.  They were always doing things like
pulling boards out or putting them in when the power was on.  At one time
or another, they blew every single board on the bus.  The best move they
pulled was when one of them plugged the CPU board, which was only a
dual-width board in the MIDDLE of the bus (not on one side or the other
which would have been ok).  As soon as the power was turned on, the
CPU board was blown to kingdom-come.  The computer knurds managed to
identify all the bad chips and replace them -- except for the microcode
rom.  When they called DEC, they were told that the '04 was out of production
and that there was no way they could get a replacement.  What DEC did do
for them was to send an octal dump of the microcode to them.  They wound
up in the tech room where I worked with a prom chip and a twelve volt
power supply burning a new chip by hand, bit by bit.

By the way, here's two practical jokes that we thought of but refrained
from pulling (we didn't need to, the computer knurds were doing it for us):

1) go to the big disk drive, remove the pack, and place damp laundry
all around the perimeter.

2) pull out any board, and spray clear Krylon across the fingers.  They'd
never have debugged that one.

		-ed falk, sun microsystems