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From: rpw3@amdcad.AMD.COM (Rob Warnock)
Newsgroups: talk.bizarre,comp.misc
Subject: Re: What the world needs now [ is an exploding computer ]
Message-ID: <16987@amdcad.AMD.COM>
Date: Wed, 3-Jun-87 22:13:07 EDT
Article-I.D.: amdcad.16987
Posted: Wed Jun  3 22:13:07 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 7-Jun-87 05:27:33 EDT
References: <12067@topaz.rutgers.edu> <910@killer.UUCP> <170@auvax.UUCP>
Reply-To: rpw3@amdcad.UUCP (Rob Warnock)
Organization: [Consultant] San Mateo, CA
Lines: 23
Summary: "PRINT FIRE" (and it does!)
Xref: mnetor talk.bizarre:1949 comp.misc:646

O.k., o.k., out it comes again...

There's this ancient story [true? or fairy tale? who knows?] about a DEC line
printer that had an inadequate static supressor on the output side of the
paper path, and an engineer who was having trouble convincing management that
there was a problem. So he constructed a file that had "<ff>x<ff>x<ff>x...",
that is, one letter per page, and named it "fire". Then he called up the
operators in the DEC data center and told them to ".PRINT FIRE". They did.
It did. (And the printer got fixed...)

p.s. The file couldn't just be all form feeds, because there was a "paper
runaway detector" that stopped the printer from spewing paper after 3 or so
sheets with nothing on them. But one letter per page still let the paper
build up a good static charge while defeating the paper runaway detector.


Rob Warnock
Systems Architecture Consultant

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