5 Oct
2004
5 Oct
'04
2:41 a.m.
On Oct 5, 2004, at 3:33 AM, Jules Richardson wrote:
Modern head crashes are boring though. It's no
good unless platters
physically explode :-) If only they could catch fire, too. There just
aren't enough modern-day computing war stories around...
On topic computing war story (sort of)
When I worked for Calma as a computer operator I was in the office one
saturday writing
a "command line history" thing for my login on the vax (vms 3x) when
the vax got real slow
and complained that it couldn't write some file. So I went off to the
computer room (raised floor,
locked doors...) on arrival I found a brown haze floating in the upper
3rd of the football field
sized room. That was the oxide that at one time held the contents of
the system disk.
No more playing for me that day :^( It only took a day for us to
replace the 400mb drive that
had crashed with a new "eagle" that looked to the vax as 2 400mb
drives. Each night at midnight
the whole content of one of the drives was copied to the other. Made
file restores much easier.