On 07/19/2013 11:59 PM, Jon Elson wrote: > My old microVAX is right next to me, it was SUCH a hot machine in 1986 when > I got it.
MicroVAX? Ha! I had a VAX 11/780 system in my suburban living room. I rescued it from a local hospital that was going to be forced to pay $6000 to have it hauled away as toxic scrap, before commodity prices went insane and the thriving metals recycling market emerged. The VAX occupied almost my entire living room, including the CPU, line printer, control console and the two hard disk drives (each of which was larger than a commercial clothes washer and could store a whopping 256 Mb of data. I was forced to dispose of the VAX a few years later as a requirement of getting married. On 07/19/2013 07:58 AM, Ed Nisley wrote: > Once upon a time, I poured a box of punch card flakes through that > (running) fan, thoroughly coating one of my cronies in the first shower > stall. The official IBM name for the debris from the punch cards was CHAD. In college, we called them punchies. IBM had a service bulletin advising customers and field service engineers of the dangers of the little pieces of cardstock that could become lodged in the corner of someone's eye. That didn't stop the nocturnal student inhabitants of our university's computing center from making "punchy bombs". Chad had properties of a solid and a liquid. It could be packed like a snowball and hurled a short distance, trailing a cometary tail of punchies. When it rained, someone would come in sopping wet and a punchy bomb would explode on impact, sticking to the poor wet victim, sometimes for days (hygiene not being a priority for nerds). We'd also punchy cars. Dump them in the vent under the windshield and the inside of the car would look like one of those glass paper weights that is shaken to give the appearance of snow falling on a coyote eating a woodpecker. We never understood why, but the mean time between a car being punchied and the time it was totaled in a car wreck was about seven months. It may have been the result of the driver being distracted by a stray punchy bit flying out of a vent a few months later. It's impossible to un-punchy a car. The bits of chad get into every nook and cranny. BTW - A friend's ditzy girlfriend was amazed that IBM was able to precisely print the little numbers in the center of each of those tiny pieces of cardstock! ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ See everything from the browser to the database with AppDynamics Get end-to-end visibility with application monitoring from AppDynamics Isolate bottlenecks and diagnose root cause in seconds. Start your free trial of AppDynamics Pro today! http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=48808831&iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
