Thoughts -> Re: classiccmp server

[Ron Hudson]

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.