I'm pretty sure this happened with VM, though might have been with OS/360 and HASP.
User brought odd printout (1403 or 3211) to system programming, asked what happened. It showed two output streams overprinted -- like a double exposed photo. Clearly impossible, but there it was. Research eventually revealed that someone had violated best practices and allowed a user into computer room. She had output, dropped it in a recycle box. Except it wasn't recycle, was next box of paper to be used. So operator fed it through printer without noticing it had been used. It was printed on again as part of someone else's output, which they received. Go figure, offender was already a user not popular with either operators or system programmers so this was just another strike on the scorecard. On Fri, 10 Nov 2023 23:12:23 -0800, Leonard D Woren <ibm-main...@ldworen.net> wrote: >Bob Bridges wrote on 11/8/2023 6:56 AM: >> Reminds me of an old tagline: >> >> /* The more sophisticated the technology, the more vulnerable it is to >> primitive attack. People often overlook the obvious. -Dr Who, 1978 */ > >Long ago I was told why my shop didn't carpet the tape storage area. >Apparently some shop that did had a problem with unreadable tapes. >Eventually they figured out that all the unreadable tapes were on the >bottom row of the tape storage. And the outside cleaning people used >a vacuum cleaner... > > >Farley, Peter wrote on 11/8/2023 7:58 AM: >> 1401N1 printer (the big beast) raised its hood automatically when it ran out >> of paper, no way to turn off that behavior. NEVER put your coffee cup on >> top of that printer!! > >Supposedly the reason that IBM put that feature on the 1403 was some >big shops had a lot of 1403s and it helped the operator find the >printer that needed to be fed. Unfortunately, the feature didn't have >a failsafe. It was common to stack boxes of paper behind the >printer. At least once at UCLA, someone had stacked it one box too >high, and when the printer cover went up, the back end of the cover >was blocked by the too-high stack, raising the printer off the floor. > >And BTW, the 3211 had a "raise cover" CCW. I had some fun with that, >and one of the other IBM-MAIN readers probably remembers that, from >Post 360. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
