Xref: utzoo rec.humor:19087 rec.humor.d:1662 comp.misc:5189
Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ames!amdahl!pacbell!ptsfa!dmt
From: dmt@ptsfa.PacBell.COM (Dave Turner)
Newsgroups: rec.humor,rec.humor.d,comp.misc
Subject: Re: Looking for Computer Folklore
Keywords: Rebuilding FS from Free Blocks
Message-ID: <4688@ptsfa.PacBell.COM>
Date: 18 Feb 89 01:37:58 GMT
References: <7143@pyr.gatech.EDU> <4744@sfsup.UUCP> <2887@sybase.sybase.com> <1912I78BC@CUNYVM> <1036@tutor.tut.fi> <6761@pogo.GPID.TEK.COM> <557@rpi.edu> <6321@saturn.ucsc.edu> <83525@felix.UUCP>
Reply-To: dmt@ptsfa.PacBell.COM (Dave Turner)
Organization: Pacific * Bell, San Ramon, CA
Lines: 30

This was told to me by a former supervisor (retired):

In the late 1960's, Pacific Telephone installed a new computer room on the
10th or 11th floor of a new highrise in downtown Los Angeles. The building
was one of the tallest around at that time. Its walls were all glass.

The computer had 20 or 30 tape drives and was to be used for a new system
that would run a transaction system during the day and a batch system at
night. The output from the daytime online system would feed the nighttime
batch system for master file updating. Some of the master file runs would
take hours.

Most of the testing was done during the daytime.

On the first day of production there were the usual problems and the
batch system was running behind schedule.

At dawn when the sun came up it shined through the windows on the tape
drives which immediately went into high speed rewind and unloaded the
tapes.

The sun had shined on the end-of-tape sensors which caused the tapes
to rewind.

After that one of the nightly duties of the graveyard shift supervisor
was to insure that the drapes were closed before the sun came up.


-- 
Dave Turner	415/542-1299	{att,bellcore,sun,ames,pyramid}!pacbell!dmt