Resolved: Re: 11/34 sanity check

Don North north at alum.mit.edu
Thu Apr 30 05:08:40 CDT 2015


On 4/30/2015 1:31 AM, Johnny Billquist wrote:
> On 2015-04-30 00:36, Noel Chiappa wrote:
>>      > From: Johnny Billquist
>>
>>      > On 2015-04-27 00:50, Mike Ross wrote:
>>
>>      >> One does not casually reverse the installation of cables just to see
>>      >> if maybe it will work!
>>
>>      > Actually.... I often have done so, just because of this.
>>
>> And how many times have you melted something down, doing that? :-)
>
> Not a single time. DEC engineered things wisely.
>
>     Johnny
>

Heh if DEC engineered things wisely it would have been impossible to plug any
cable in backwards, and there would never had been the need to reverse cables
when a device was apparently not working correctly...

... instead of figuring out how to make the system such that it could not be
assembled incorrectly, they took the lazy way out, and did enough so that a
dumb error (reversing a cable) did not cause a fire. This still allowed for 
assembling
a system that would not work, however.


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