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From: jhh@ihlpl.UUCP (Haller)
Newsgroups: net.rumor
Subject: Re: Computer horror stories
Message-ID: <700@ihlpl.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 17-Mar-86 14:21:51 EST
Article-I.D.: ihlpl.700
Posted: Mon Mar 17 14:21:51 1986
Date-Received: Wed, 19-Mar-86 04:50:26 EST
References: <1629@decwrl.DEC.COM> <1068@loral.UUCP>
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories
Lines: 13

At my school, the EE department was having their PDP 11/45 placed under
a service contract.  Their maintenance costs were very high on a per call
basis.  To give an idea, in the initial upgrading before being put under
contract, they threw out the old backplane because of the high number
of un-applied ECOs.  The big problem they ran into was a glitch in the
power supplies that only happened during disk accesses (sometimes).

After much searching (at per call rates), they found that a ground
strap was not attached, and when the RK05s in the frame did a full
cylinder seek, the ground strap would swing into one of the power
supply terminals, shorting it for a brief period.

John Haller