Sender: cate3@arisia.Xerox.COM ---------------------------------------------------- Told to me by my girlfriend: On her second year in college a professor came to their class and was telling them about his new students (freshmen). When he asked them to comment all their programs, this is what he got: - "This program is very nice" - "This program is very difficult" - "This program is very interesting"........ ---------------------------------------------------- At Calgary, the computer science department has an award called the Williams Cup (as in old stained coffee cup), which is given yearly to the student who hands in the most imaginative rendition of a regular programming assignment. Anyway, as the story goes, the cup was awarded to a student who'd done a desk calculator assignment. Seems that the prof hadn't specified that you had to do it in decimal, so his/her program did math with _roman_numerals_. The clincher for the award must have been his/her programming style, since of course, the documentation was in _latin_ 8-) ---------------------------------------------------- A friend worked for a company that made IC's. It seemed that every few months their yeilds would go down to about zero. Analysis of the failures showed all sorts of organic material was introduced into the process somewhere but they couldn't figure out where. One evening someone was working late and came into the lab. There he found the maintainence crew cooking pizza in the chip curing ovens! ---------------------------------------------------- This tale is true, I was there. The DEC users group here occasionally has Q+A sessions with a representative of said company which sometimes become complaint and apology sessions. I remember one particular complaint from a Physics professor who claimed that his microVax was having problems with its tk50 tape drive and he had lost a fair quantity of data when the drive allegedly mangled a tape (magnetically, not physically). Some discussion ensued and the professor griped that he also didn't like the way that the screen display "flexed" every time they turned the equipment on next door. It turns out that the "equipment next door" is a largish Tokomak fusion reactor - the electromagnets in the thing have to be seen to be believed. (And this man is a physics professor - phew!) ---------------------------------------------------- The other story says that a customer wanted something fixed for a particular hardware setup for which we had no docs. The problem shouldn't be difficult to solve, but we needed the docs and the customer was really in a hurry. The person in charge of the thing asked the customer if he would be willing to FAX us a certain part of the manuals. After a moment's thought, he answered "OK, but only if you promise to FAX it back!" ---------------------------------------------------- I dont know if anyone else has repeated this one or not. I was at a DECUS conference about 6 yrs ago when a system programmer was laughing about programming a Dec machine to seek around on a disk drive enough to cause the cabinet to rock. Apparently this became some sort of a game, so that they actually wrote programs to make the drive cabinet walk around the room to particular locations... ---------------------------------------------------- Some computer-illiterate visitors were shown the CDC6400 at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. One of them asked how does the machine do all these wonderful things; their guide joked that it has a small man inside. While he was speaking, a CDC technician (the late Rachmim Moreno, a small man indeed) has just finished some routine maintenance and stepped out of the machine. ---------------------------------------------------- Real, real, true, swear-by-God story: A friend of mine was repairing a Russian EC-20 computer in Bangalore, India. He found an insulated wire soldered to a pin of a chip. Looking for the other end, he traced and he traced and he traced - 10 feet of wire, and the other end was soldered to an adjacent chip! As it turned out, they needed a 10 ns delay between the two pins. ---------------------------------------------------- While a student at UCSD in the middle 60's I had the opportunity to work many late nights in the computer punch card room on my physical chemistry lab calculations. One late night when the computer operator was obviously bored, he invited me into the sanctum sanctorum - the computer room. The computer was a CDC 3600 and had a curving CONSOLE about 8 feet long with several hundred lights and switches (in those days, there was no such thing as terminal input). On the far wall was a bank of a dozen 1/2" tape drives with vacuum column tape tension control. He loaded up a deck into the card reader (the only command input device) and started it. For the next 1/2 hour the computer PLAYED the Stars and Stripes Forever and assorted Sousa marches, using the tones on the CONSOLE (every light had its own tone) for the high low notes and the tape drives for the low notes. At the same time, all the lights on the CONSOLE were blinking on and off. Since I am now a full-time programmer, I finally appreciate the work it must have taken a system level programmer to do that. Talk about primitive audio devices! ---------------------------------------------------- Heard recently from an IBM field service manager: A huge travel agency in Florida (a major booker of Caribbean cruises for blue-haired retired ladies) recently bought an IBM 3090 to handle the reservation database. When the deal was consummated, the proud new owner asked IBM to install it in a big glass room right behind the receptionist's area so all the customers could see the flashing lights and spinning tape reels as they walked in -- a testimony to the modernity of the agency. Good idea, except there are no blinking lights on a 3090. So the service manager offered to build some. They hired a theatrical designer to come up with a suitably futuristic "set", got curved glass walls to minimize reflections, and installed the mainframe behind the "real-looking" facade. The customer declared that it was exactly what he had in mind, regardless of what the actual computer looks like. Moral: the customer is always right. ---------------------------------------------------- This is the same company (my wife used to be CS manager there) where an irate customer couldn't save his records to disk. The error message he reported would only have appeared on a full disk, but he claimed that he checked the space remaining and it was "okay." Turns out that the program he ran to check remaining space on a disk drive returned the amount of free space, expressed in kbytes. A full disk, therefore, returned the string 0k (where 0 = zero). Then there was the customer who complained because the new software release wouldn't print. This customer just *knew* he'd caught the software company in a bug and he was demanding his money back. My wife stepped through the whole process, set up a duplicate system on her end of the phone, and spent a fair amount of time duplicating his situation. At last she determined that the only possible failure was that his printer wasn't on line. "I've managed to duplicate your error message," she finally told him after about three days of this. "Aha! It *is* a bug, and you'll finally admit it! Are you going to refund my money?" "Well, we'll see," she said. "First, look on your printer and see if the little green light marked 'on line' is lit." "No, it isn't. What does it mean if it's not on line?" "Well, it's like the lights are on but nobody's home..." He never asked for his money back again. ---------------------------------------------------- Henry Cate III -------------- (ucbvax!xerox.com!cate3.osbunorth) OR (cate3.osbunorth@Xerox.Com) An effective way to deal with predators is to taste terrible.