Have a small hardware one.... About 1986 I was tasked with moving a small block (a few KB) of data very quickly from cabinet A to B, with the racks full of cus

Have a small hardware one.... About 1986 I was tasked with moving a small block (a few KB) of data very quickly from cabinet A to B, with the racks full of custom electronics - no PCs, all original stuff on a flight sim with 386 Intel processors all over the place. The racks had Multibus backplanes. I suggested a 'TAXI' fast optical link (oooh - optical..too radical) or a pair of Intel 589 (Ethernet) cards for an off-the-shelf solution. Nope, too expensive. Engineering Management suggested a twisted pair ribbon cable between the two adjacent racks - um, OK.. Long story short - me and the senior design engineer decided to use the Intel 8257 DMA controller chip to grab the bus and blast the data between the RAM on two cards. After a short period of fails, we found that the engineers who designed our 386 cards did not bi-directional buffer the DMA request line onto the backplane as they never expected any other card except the master CPU ones to initiate a DMA, so the CPU cards could not see the line being toggled from elsewhere. Engineers would not accept a change request for 'reasons' Intel 589 cards is it then! All because someone chose to omit one tristate buffer.