Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!decwrl!sun!pitstop!sundc!seismo!uunet!mcvax!unido!sbsvax!greim From: greim@sbsvax.UUCP (Michael Greim) Newsgroups: comp.misc Subject: Re: Looking for Computer Folklore Message-ID: <686@sbsvax.UUCP> Date: 16 Feb 89 14:49:38 GMT References: <7143@pyr.gatech.EDU> <4744@sfsup.UUCP> <2858@ddsw1.MCS.COM> <11740@reed.UUCP> Followup-To: poster Organization: Universitaet des Saarlandes, Saarbruecken, W-Germany Lines: 39 In article <11740@reed.UUCP>, indigo@reed.UUCP (Seven Chinese Brothers) writes: > > My friend's kid once spilled coke on his father's keyboard. When the father > called a Digital repairman, he was told to put it in a dish washer. He did, > and it worked perfectly after that.... > > --Hiroshi They must have improved their design. Some years ago I spilled coke on a digital lineprinter with keyboard, er ... what is it called, ... L100 or something. We cleaned the board with alcohol but all we got was strange characters when we hit a key. (The following text already appeared in comp.misc under "computer follies" as 627@sbsvax.UUCP. The system in question is UNIX'ish) Once upon a time a guy from another department came into our room and complained : "Our machine is totally broken. It doesn't do anything." Well, we had a look, and indeed the machine did not even boot. I don't remember the exact error message, but it was one which we had not seen previously. We asked him : "What have you done to the system?" We let him describe his last actions. And finally truth was uncovered: he said: "I was looking for some place on the root file system. I discovered two large files and threw them away. But I did not notice anything strange happen after that." "What was their name?" "Aeh, sinix and vmsinix." (variant of (vm)unix for this machine) Well, we were able to help him with a copy of ours. -mg -- email : greim@sbsvax.informatik.uni-saarland.dbp.de (some mailers might not like this. Then use greim@sbsvax.uucp) or : ...!uunet!unido!sbsvax!greim # include