Fun with VAXen

The topic of single phase vs. an 11/780 reminds me of a little prank back in college around 1990ish. I had a few part-time jobs at various times in one of the computer support organizations back then. First as a backup operator doing tape backups on a graveyard shift, then later as a consultant at the support desk doing noob-support, then later in another portion of the department doing tool builds and light UNIX programming. They paid me and everything, so it's good that I never mentioned that I probably would have done the job just for that key to the machine room and the root passwords they gave me... The best part was being able to do homework after hours on the department's Sun workstations and VAXen rather than fighting over older workstations in the EE and CS department terminal rooms. Pretty much unlimited access to VAXen, Suns, Decstations, and even a NeXT cube. No silly CPU, disk or printing quotas, and 24/7 access to the main machine room. Good times, good times... Anyway, once a friend of mine and I decided to play a prank on our boss while he was away on vacation. There was a decommissioned 11/780 or 11/785 in the machine room. We noticed that the blowers were all 120V single-phase, so we pushed the main cabinet down the hall late one evening and crammed it into the boss's office. That was a tiny office, and it barely fit with enough room to squeeze by. Then we plugged in a few fans so it sounded like it was turned on, stuck a small hard-copy terminal on his desk, and manually typed up stuff to make it look like we were trying to boot the beast. I wish I could have seen his face when he got back from vacation... Later on, in another part of that department, another vacationing boss got a TU-77 rolled into his small office and turned on. Not my doing, but that was another classic. -- Mark J. Blair, NF6X <nf6x at nf6x.net> http://www.nf6x.net/