Xref: utzoo rec.humor:18821 rec.humor.d:1617 comp.misc:5074 Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!decwrl!adobe!jackson From: jackson@adobe.COM (Curtis Jackson) Newsgroups: rec.humor,rec.humor.d,comp.misc Subject: Re: Looking for Computer Folklore Message-ID: <435@adobe.UUCP> Date: 11 Feb 89 20:38:25 GMT References: <744@utkcs2.cs.utk.edu> <6286@saturn.ucsc.edu> <1582@uwovax.uwo.ca> Reply-To: jackson@adobe.UUCP (Curtis Jackson) Followup-To: rec.humor Organization: Adobe Systems Incorporated, Mountain View Lines: 45 Hmmmm, been reading this thread for a while now and thought I'd contribute to the massacre (pronounced mas-uh-crE, of course ;-) I'll refrain (I hope) from duplicating any of the stories that have already been related here: A disgruntled employee at NavOCEANO (Naval Ocean Office, I believe) across the street from me when I worked at NORDA (Naval Ocean R&D Activity) decided to get even with the locals. There was a large Univac installation there, and some ultra-high-speed card readers. He hollowed out an entire box of punch cards (about 2.5 feet of cards, for all you youngsters) and filled them with old old old bananas. He then submitted this deck as a job. The operators were used to multi-box jobs, so they usually just picked up the entire box of cards and dumped them in the high-speed readers. It took over 3 weeks of maintenance before the reader was working reliably again, and the control room reeked of banana for weeks afterwards... When crucial data on tape was lost at my university, the gurus in the computer room would retrieve as much data as possible, then fill in the gaps by soaking the tapes in a solution that made the individual bits show up as 1 or 0 (dark or light) under a magnifier; they'd then hand-assemble the missing sections from the visual inspection. I once spent an entire night (over 12 hours) trying to get my compiler (working up to that point) to work again so I could work on it some more for my compilers course. At the end, I had reduced the problem down to a program (C code) that basically declared an integer 'i', said "i=5", then printed 'i'. The program printed a floating-point number... I was so angry I got the idiot who had been mucking around with the C compiler from Bell Labs in the lab at 7am in Sunday morning to fix the damned thing. Our aged PDP-10 finally died one weekend when we had an unusually hot Sunday (there was no operator support on Sundays until 6pm) and it turned out the fall leaves had never been cleared from the AC vents by the university physical plant. The temperature got over 100 degrees F in the computer room, and the old CPU on the 10 wouldn't even whimper afterwards. It's amazing how many of us remember the "Good Ole Days" -- didn't you hate patching paper tape? Yeecchhh. -- Curtis Jackson @ Adobe Systems in Mountain View, CA (415-962-4905) Internet: jackson@adobe.com uucp: ...!{decwrl|sun}!adobe!jackson