From a friend:
I believe the head crash story is true. I worked in The Mill and had
heard about that. Lending credibility to that story was another: that on
hot days in the summer, before the Mill was air conditioned, lanolin
used to seep out of the wooden floors and you could easily slip and
fall. Before DEC bought the Mill, it was a woolen mill. You could still
smell the lanolin in many of the buildings when I worked there, so I
tended to believe those stories. Another - not so benign - was that
during the years when circuit boards used to be manufactured there,
waste chemicals (including lead solder, etching acid, etc.) were dumped
into the pond next to one of the buildings. This pond fed into the
nearby Assabet river. DEC had to do quite a bit of cleanup, but the pond
was never completely cleaned (last I heard), it was eventually just
sealed off so that whatever was left remained there and didn't pollute
the river anymore. Wouldn't want to eat any of the fish out of that
pond. There were surely many other stories that I never heard.
On 4/13/2019 12:16 PM, Gabe Goldberg wrote:
Many years ago I had friends in old DEC building in Maynard, MA. They
had story of periodic head crashes on monster disk drives with
vertically spinning platters. They realized cause: trucks backing into
loading dock hitting and shaking the building -- since platters were
oriented perpendicular to truck motion. Solution: turn drives 90
degrees to align platters with truck motion. At worst, I/O errors but
no head crashes (I guess heads flew much higher than on today's
devices). I'll ask veterans I know of that time/place to confirm...
ITschak Mugzach<[email protected]> said:
That reminds me another story. ten years ago a client of us installed
a new
hitachi disk array. The technician installed and configured the array,
but
for some reasons, it was not immediately used by the client. few days
later, the client tried to connect to the array and it was down. it was
repeatedly don everyday afterwards. investigation showed that the the
people who cleans the computer room unplugged the power for the vacuum
cleaner... The array was using a standard power plug.
--
Gabriel Goldberg, Computers and Publishing, Inc. [email protected]
3401 Silver Maple Place, Falls Church, VA 22042 (703) 204-0433
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/gabegold Twitter: GabeG0
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