Xref: utzoo rec.humor:19007 rec.humor.d:1654 comp.misc:5172 Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!sunkisd!uunet!tektronix!percival!parsely!agora!ihf1!bobd From: bobd@ihf1.UUCP (Bob Dietrich) Newsgroups: rec.humor,rec.humor.d,comp.misc Subject: Re: Looking for Computer Folklore Message-ID: <524@ihf1.UUCP> Date: 14 Feb 89 20:58:48 GMT References: <744@utkcs2.cs.utk.edu> Reply-To: bobd@ihf1.UUCP (Bob Dietrich) Organization: Intel Corp., Hillsboro, Oregon Lines: 27 In the early 70's I took care of a PDP-15 for a department at the university. It was an interesting machine: half a PDP-10 (18-bit words), faster than most early PDP-11's, but the hardware and instruction set had a strong PDP-8 influence. It even had two different buses, one of which you could hang PDP-8 peripherals on. About 750 of them were sold. The machine was fairly reliable (except for smoking power transistors on the DECtape drives every month), but at one point the main power supply started failing intermittently. Since we weren't on service contract, it was going to take a while for DEC to come out and fix the machine. So they gave us a procedure to follow so we could limp along in the meantime. The fix? Go to the back of the cabinet, second door from the right. Locate an imaginary spot about 18 inches from the floor. Now kick, but not hard enough to dent the sheet metal. This would allow the system to run for another 15 to 30 minutes before it crashed again. Turns out there was a mercury filled relay in the power supply. Kicking the cabinet make things vibrate enough to make the power supply turn on again for a while. We were glad when DEC arrived, although some people didn't get as much satisfaction running their programs after the real fix. Now you know why I prefer to keep my PC on the floor. ;-) usenet: uunet!littlei!intelhf!ihf1!bobd Bob Dietrich or tektronix!ogccse!omepd!ihf1!bobd Intel Corp., Hillsboro, Oregon or tektronix!psu-cs!omepd!ihf1!bobd (503) 696-2092