On Mon, Aug 29, 2016 at 4:51 PM, Sean Donelan <sean@donelan.com> wrote:
See that big red button on the wall under the sign "Do Not Push This Button!"....
This is going to date me, well, because it happened in my high school years mid 1970's... but my best power off story was when in senior year we were working on the school Sperry/Univac Solid State Systems 90 mainframe. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIVAC_Solid_State) Well this thing used a Mil-Spec 4K DRUM as its main memory. Now being mil-spec means the motor to spin the drum is 400 cycle AC. Where do you get 400 cycle AC in a 60 cycle world? Well you install a 60 cycle motor in the base of this monstrosity, and connect it via a fan belt to a 400 cycle AC generator that feeds the drum. We came in to class one day to warm the Univac up (it took about 30 minutes to fully power up) and noticed the machine being very quiet when we applied power. We eventually tracked it down to no power to the drum and it not spinning. And the reason the drum was not spinning? The fan belt had broken on the motor/generator set. :) Lucky, this was a Technical/Vocational high school, and we ran down to the auto repair class and bummed a new belt off them. :) ---- Then there was the time an engineer I worked with pressed the lamp test button on the huge engineering console display for a Burroughs B6700 room sized mainframe (like 3 foot by 3 foot bank of incandescent register and status displays) and the inrush caused the entire machine shut down.... but that's another story. ;) Chris Dunn Data Center Operations ServerCentral