Wow. Do you remember if the board was in the tape unit itself or the TM03?
My guess would be the FETs that control the tape motors shorting and
turning into a fireball. Still cool as hell :-)
CZ
(Had a TU77 at home. Never caught fire)
On 7/3/2025 10:28 PM, Ethan Dicks via cctalk wrote:
On Thu, Jul 3, 2025 at 4:19 PM Wayne S via cctalk <[email protected]> wrote:
Yes, stats are kept about issues.
Someone should look at the stats and start to investigate when there’s a lot of
failures with the same issue. Explicit instructions should be sent to field
engineers to take extra steps to document what they found and how it was
resolved, and report their conclusions back to the investigation leader.
I remember the DEC-20 at Ohio State. It had a TU77 tape drive. This
was back in the days of paper Operator Logs. One day, it went like
this:
09:23 TU77 catches fire
09:24 TU77 puts itself out
09:35 TU77 won't load tapes, Called Field Service.
When they called, the convo went something like, "you have a TU77 on
fire? We'll be right out." No additional questions. FS Engineer
comes out with one satchel, opens the tape drive, pops out one board,
pops in a replacement from his satchel, and the drive comes back to
life.
Clearly not his first barbeque.
-ethan
