On 2/22/21 9:14 AM, Alain Hebert wrote:
*[External Email]*
Well...
During my younger days, that button was used a few time by the
operator of a VM/370 to regain control from someone with a "curious
mind" *cought* *cought*...
Two horror stories I remember from long ago when I was a console jockey
for a federal space agency that will remain nameless :P
1. A coworker brought her daughter to work with her on a Saturday
overtime shift because she couldn't get a babysitter. She parked the kid
with a coloring book and a pile of crayons at the only table in the
console room with some space, right next to the master console for our
3081. I asked her to make sure sh was well away from the console, and as
she reached over to scoot the girl and her coloring books further away
she slipped, and reached out to steady herself. Yep, planted her finger
right down on the IML button (plexi covers? We don' need no STEENKIN'
plexi covers!). MVS and VM vanished, two dozen tape drives rewound and
several hours' worth of data merge jobs went blooey.
2. The 3081 was water cooled via a heat exchanger. The building chilled
water feed had a very old, very clogged filter that was bypassed until
it could be replaced. One day a new maintenance foreman came through the
building doing his "clipboard and harried expression" thing, and spotted
the filter in bypass (NO, I don't know WHY it hadn't been red-tagged.
Someone clearly dropped that ball.) He thought, "Well that's not right"
and reset all the valves to put it back inline, which of course, pretty
much killed the chilled water flow through the heat exchanger. First
thing we knew about it in Operations was when the 3081 started throwing
thermal alarms and MVS crashed hard. IBM had to replace several modules
in the CPUs.
--
--------------------------------------------
Bruce H. McIntosh
Network Engineer II
University of Florida Information Technology
b...@ufl.edu
352-273-1066
