I have this vague memory that back in the day, any well-equipped computer operator would
have a tool in the desk drawer which trims the end of a mangled magtape to a nice, neat
curve. Do I actually remember that, or did I make it up? As I get older, my imagination is
getting better than my memory, and it's getting a lot easier to vividly remember
things that never happened.
If such a tool exists, I want one!
I recall another little tool (and I think I still have one somewhere) that was a give-away
from the Sun User's Group. It was a little pocket-clip screwdriver with a flat blade
on one end, a hex key for VME card mounting screws on the other, and "SUGtool"
or something like that marked on the side.
One of our printers in the computer room that I worked in at UCI in the late 1980s had a
tool sitting about for punching the carriage control tapes for one of our old line
printers. We had separate printer queues for letter sized and wide format paper, both
pointing at the same printer. One of the operator's jobs was to frequently stop one
queue, change the control tape loop and the paper in the printer, then enable the other
queue.
Write rings were littered all over the place, naturally. And then there was the
suction-cup tool for lifting the raised floor tiles.
What else might be found in the operator's desk drawer or sitting around the computer
room?
--
Mark J. Blair, NF6X <nf6x at nf6x.net>
http://www.nf6x.net/