Cooling and leaks; was: removing parts from PCBs

On 11/16/2005 at 10:46 AM Allison wrote: At CDC Sunnyvale, we had a big cooling tower that handled both the chilled water for the computers as well as the HVAC for the building. When I first came to Sunnyvale, I remember that the first thing that I saw of the building (sitting in the middle of an onion field) was the big vapor plume. I can't ever remember seeing a water leak in the machine room. The Bryant 6603 disks (and one very memorable 808 drive) would leak hydraulic fluid, however. Made a terrible mess. By far, the worst problem was construction that was going on in the area. It would cause the power to go out at unexpected times. Bringing a machine back up after a power failure in those days was a major chore taking hours and sometimes days. Normally, machines were never powered down, except for moving or major maintenance. As I remember it, both CDC and Cray used the same guy to design their refrigeration--and he wasn't an employee of either firm, but a guy who used to work for Amana. Cheers, Chuck