There is a very similar story about an early super computer developed at Control Data in the 70's.
An AC outlet on the side of the machine was intended for engineering for debug instruments. But nightly, when the cleaning lady plugged in her vacuum cleaner, the machine would crash. It took days to figure it out. Terry On Thursday, April 20, 2017 at 2:34:21 AM UTC-5, [email protected] wrote: > > That story reminds me of one from work. Not Nixie-related but sorta funny > :) > > Years ago, work had an IBM System/360 ot /370 of some age; It started > having faults at random times, so they called in the tech. He opened the > system covers, tied in all the diagnostics tools - logic analyzer, etc, > but, zero faults happened over a couple days of his running those; So they > pulled them out & closed the system up. Next day a few faults happened, so > he was called back in, wired it up and ran it another week, no faults. He > pulled the test gear & closed it up, but it crashed before he even made it > to his car; He was called back in and of course once wired up, zero > errors... > > The light finally lit up on someone's brain in there (reports varied on > whose!) - That the system cover doors, when OPEN, would preclude any > errors, but when they were closed, errors would occur; So they looked at > the wiring harnesses and found the harness that was flexing when the doors > were closed, which had a nasty intermittent in there, that was only going > open circuit VERY rarely, if quite enough to be horribly ANNOYING. > > Systems Engineers types and so on, HATE intermittents, they're the bane of > their existence :P LOL And they're quite annoying to debug, sometimes you > can't figure out where the darned things are hiding at all. > > Mark > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "neonixie-l" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web, visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/neonixie-l/03b8a8e6-a5ba-4451-abe3-ba33a299f26d%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
