> For those of you who haven't experienced it, it is quite un-nerving to walk > into your computer room and it is Dead Silent. Well, not totally dead.
This is quite a famous little story. Someone will doubtless find an old version in the archives. Many years ago (early 1980s) I had a customer (RZ Schulte) in Aßlar, near Wetzlar in Germany. They were supplied by low-voltage landlines over some low hills that were very prone to thunderstorms in summer - complete power outages occured every few weeks. They had 2 x ITEL AS/5s - notoriously unreliable machines and very sensitive to power issues. We wanted to replace them with an AS/6-2 - a Hitachi S6 (later known as the NAS AS/7000) - that was powered via its own motor generators and almost surge proof. Eventually, we did - a second-hand one from Continental Gummiwerke in Hannover. During the sales process I made a technical presentation about the machine. Some weeks later a thunderstorm broke out. I watched it develop and sweep towards the hills from my 9th floor office in FRankfurt/Niederrad. A while later, my phone rang. It was Herr Schulte himself. "HERR PAYNE!!" "Herr Schulte." "HERR PAYNE, WHEN I BOUGHT THIS MACHINE, YOU PROMISED ME IT WOULDN'T GO DOWN IN A THUNDERSTORM!!" "That's right, Herr Schulte, I did." "WELL, IT HASN'T. BUT EVERYTHING ELSE HAS!!" The operators later told me he'd called from the processor console, with the dear old AS/6 humming quietly away in a silent and dark computer room, wondering where all its disks had gone. -- Phil Payne http://www.isham-research.co.uk +44 7833 654 800 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
