Xref: utzoo rec.humor:18525 rec.humor.d:1549 comp.misc:4918
Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ames!ucsd!rutgers!bellcore!texbell!uhnix1!moray!siswat!buck
From: buck@siswat.UUCP (A. Lester Buck)
Newsgroups: rec.humor,rec.humor.d,comp.misc
Subject: Re: Looking for Computer Folklore
Summary: Computer fun with microwave ovens
Message-ID: <376@siswat.UUCP>
Date: 5 Feb 89 19:11:48 GMT
References: <7143@pyr.gatech.EDU> <4744@sfsup.UUCP> <1357@umbio.MIAMI.EDU> <35619@bbn.COM>
Organization: Photon Graphics, Houston
Lines: 40

In article <35619@bbn.COM>, mthome@bbn.com (Mike Thome) writes:
> In article <1357@umbio.MIAMI.EDU> aem@Mthvax.Miami.Edu (a.e.mossberg) writes:
> >In <4744@sfsup.UUCP>, <saal@/doc/dsg/saalUUCP> wrote:
> >>I heard of someone that put a computer in
> >>the microwave to dry it off.  I think
> >>one of them, either the microwave or the
> >>person that did it, exploded.
> >It was a poodle, not a computer.
> This is a true story - The lady who owned the well-done dog sued Amana
> (really! Anyone know (1) for how much $$, and (2) if she won?)
> 
> The only other good (& also true) microwave story I know is:

Back to computers and microwaves...

When I was a freshman in 1971, all mainframe jobs were submitted on
cards.  And there was a snack room with microwave oven just down the
hall.   Well, we were waiting for our jobs to run and were bored,
so one of my friends had the idea - What does a microwave oven
do to a card deck?  We got a deck of blank cards and cooked them
for a while.  It is a simple physics problem to show that uniformly
heating a sphere leads to MUCH higher temperatures at the center
compared to the edge.  Of course, the card deck *looked* perfectly
normal, but inside it was charred, black and brittle.  

No, we never submitted such a deck.  We took pity on the operators
and the poor card reader...  (And with dozens of drawers of card
decks to chose from, it would have been easy to cover our tracks.)

And then there are all the stories of "rewind and break tape" macros,
(almost) all discovered accidentally.  Or the Fortran print statement
that did a line of underlines without advancing the paper, repeated
that oh, 100 times, then did 100 form feeds.  The operator was
untangling that printer for some time...

This school did have a very well-followed honor system, and it was
considered extrememly bad form to affect anyone else adversely.

-- 
A. Lester Buck		...!texbell!moray!siswat!buck