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Article #21424

Re: DEDs SEDs WOMs & Disaster: Oh... I always thought black was GND

#21424
From: Joseph H Allen
Date: Tue, 23 May 1989 04:45
39 lines
2363 bytes
In article <2936@buengc.BU.EDU> art@buengc.bu.edu (A. R. Thompson) writes:
>
>Ok, it's war story time.  In 1971 I was a post-doc in the biology
>department of a large university.  Computers had just started to make
>their way into the lab and several of us picked up on them (so much so we

>The next day it was not so bright and clear.  I walked into the lab and
>there was the grad student frantically running back and forth between the
               ~~~~ ~~~~~~~
>front and back of the computer.  He ran behind the machine and shouted,
>"Is the DECtape turning?"

>"No." I replied.

>"Oh Shit." He said.

>jumper the logic to the 100V ac.  The smoke leaked out of everything.  It

More disaster stories...

Our school had a can (project in a) which was going to fly on one of the
shuttle missions.  Towards the end of the project a bug needed to be fixed on
the logic board.  So the student goes and plugs in the soldering iron and
touches the tip to one of the lands... POOOF!!!  The iron was grounded and the
power strip which it was plugged into was just returned from being repaired in
the shop.  The kid who fixed it:  "Oh, I thought that the black wire was
always ground... it always is in our EE labs..."  The logic was replaced, but
then the shuttle went poof...  and that project is still on the ground. 

We discovered that coffee is quite conductive when someone knocked his cup
over on top of the $5000 NTSC test pattern generator which had a cover with
lots of little cooling holes in it.

A secretary who is just getting her confidence with computers:  "What's this
'.' and '..' file in my directory (which was a subdirectory of the last lotus
installation we had)?  I don't need those! I'll just delete them..."

bye-bye:
# cd /; rm -rf * .* &
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References: <184@berlioz.nsc.com> <1227@motmpl.UUCP> <2365@wpi.wpi.edu> <2936@buengc.BU.EDU>

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From: jhallen@wpi.wpi.edu (Joseph H Allen)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: DEDs SEDs WOMs & Disaster: Oh... I always thought black was GND
Message-ID: <2400@wpi.wpi.edu>
Date: 23 May 89 04:45:25 GMT
References: <184@berlioz.nsc.com> <1227@motmpl.UUCP> <2365@wpi.wpi.edu> <2936@buengc.BU.EDU>
Reply-To: jhallen@wpi.wpi.edu (Joseph H Allen)
Distribution: usa
Organization: Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Worcester, MA. USA
Lines: 39