4 ms·
> they told me that one time they let it go so far that it pulled its own cable out of the plug Not sure I believe this story as IBM channel cables have a big
by beachy 5y ago
> they told me that one time they let it go so far that it pulled its own cable out of the plug
Not sure I believe this story as IBM channel cables have a big ass screw in the center that is used to make sure they don't come loose. I can't remember if it's even possible to fully seat the connector without tightening the screw but certainly it was not a practice to leave it undone.
- nix23 5y agoI heard of a story that a Drum-drive started walking until it touted a table (over night). There is also another story i think from DEC, that there was a Company who had like 10x more head-crashes (always on the same day), bit later they found out is was the Lorry who delivered goods one floor below.
- rstuart4133 5y agoThere is another story there about someone writing assembler program calculating 50000! for a DEC PDP-10. The PDP-10's registers are memory mapped to locations 0..15, so you could write a program that ran entirely from the registers. According to the story the registers (which were TTL) overheated and died. I'm old enough to have programmed a PDP-10 when I was at Uni, and yeah once you grok'ed the architecture writing a program that ran in the registers is a challenge you set yourself. Mine computed primes using a sieve. It didn't kill anything.
- rootbear 5y agoA person of my acquaintance owned a PDP-10 which he had in his apartment. Originally he had no memory for it and could only run programs from the registers and I remember thinking how strange that was.