Date: 15 Feb 89 16:46:21 PST (Wednesday) Subject: Life 4.9 ------------------------------ "... one of the main causes of the fall of the Roman Empire was that, lacking zero, they had no way to indicate successful termination of their C programs." -- Robert Firth ------------------------------ First there were the Egyptians, then the Chinese, then the Greeks and those pushy Romans. Now, it's time for the mythology of the COMPUTER! I am looking for stories. Heard any tales second- or third-hand that sound possibly true but that "happened to a friend of a friend" in different places at different times? Good God, man or woman, that's a computer myth! I'm also interested in stories that might have started in actual fact but that have become so popular that they keep popping up. For instance, did you hear about the zero-sum check? Someone gets a computerized bill from a credit card company saying they owe the company zero dollars and zero cents. They ignore it but keep getting bills and increasingly nasty computerized notes, so they finally write out a check for zero dollars and zero cents and send it in, and the computer never bothers them again. ------------------------------ Or, there's the story about the guy who falls asleep in front of his terminal with an ELIZA program running and his boss logs on and thinks he's talking to him but is actually talking to the program, and gets pissed off. ------------------------------ OR, there's the dilemma in which computers keep crashing because an operator wears a silk slip that gives off static electricity like nobody's business, ------------------------------ I heard one story about a guy that was using an Apple IIe at work a few years ago. He was ready to give up with computers because every disk he ever tried to use would lose all of the files on it. It turned out that he kept little reminder notes attached to the disk drive - with magnets. ------------------------------ A friend was having a problem with a sticky keyboard for his Mac. He was talking to another friend who off-handedly suggested putting into the dishwasher to clean it up. So, my friend did just that! Needless to say, the keyboard didn't function any too well after that. ------------------------------ I was at GE Consulting's Training and Education Center in Albany, NY taking a course on the PC. Well, there were some inexperienced PC users there, so we had to go through the "basics" for them (i.e., the do's and don'ts of disk handling) Well, according to the instructor, there had been one student who had driven up from Bridgeport, CT (corporate offices are there). He had stayed at a nearby motel overnight, leaving his briefcase in the trunk of the car. (Oh, let me add that it was sub-zero weather at the time of this incident). In the morning he arrived at T&E, opened up his briefcase, took out a floppy disk, inserted into a drive... then *c-r-a-c-k*!!! It shattered into little pieces. Gee.. I hope it wasn't critical information on it, with no backup ------------------------------ How about the young computer salesman giving some client a demonstration of the new electronic word-processor? He loads up a large document, and says: "watch this!". He hits a couple of keys, and converts every "i" in the document to an "a", making the text unreadable. "And it you can change it all back, just like this" he proclaims, subsequently converting all "a"s back to "i", including those that had been "a"s originally. Of course, it happened to a friend of a friend of mine. ------------------------------ Another one my father told me: My dad was an electronics engineer in Greece, for a company that imported various high-tech lab equipment. One of them (A HP spectrophotometer, I think) was controlled by a special built-in computer, running optional proprietary software. Each optional package was copy protected. To enforce that, installing the package could only be done by a tech-rep; after the installation, the disks were automatically erased, and the program was kept in battery-backed RAM. Anyway, at some point the computer lost all its programs. A call had to be made to Germany, for new disks to be send as a replacement. My dad could not find the reason for this, and he was really surprised when the client called again, with the same problem next week. Call Germany again, install the disks again, then next week guess what happened: The lab calls again. But there was a definite pattern: The lab always found the system down on a Wednesday morning. Obviously, whatever went wrong happened on Tuesday nights only.... After more than a month of downtime, someone realized that the cleaning lady came to the room every Tuesday night. Someone went to check her and found out that she carried a nine-year old kid with her. The kid had discovered the machine's on-off switch, with a few buttons next to it. When the machine was on, pressing those buttons made cute sounds(AKA audible warnings!) which are supposed to alert you to the fact that holding the button down for a few seconds would completely reset the machine. I guess the kid thought of it as an oversized musical instrument. The mom turned the machine off before she left, erasing error codes, etc. No-one knows how much this story cost the lab in downtime..... ------------------------------ 1) A computer kept crashing, and every time service was called, it worked fine. It turned out that one of the users would come in, sit down at the console and put his papers and stuff on the top, covering the cooling vents. When it crashed, he'd pick up his stuff and leave, removing the evidence. Service people didn't figure this one out until they decided to watch him work to see why it crashed. 2) We had an IBM cluster controller controlling some 3270 terminals. We paid $5000 for an upgrade that would allow more users to be connected to the controller. The IBM service rep came in and REMOVED a board that was put there to deliberately slow things down. 3) (This one happened to me.) A Northern Telecom 3270 terminal caught fire, with flames coming out of the top. I guess I was doing some hot stuff. I was not putting stuff on top of the terminal cooling slots. 4) Somebody working on an airline reservation system, trying to get maximum response out of the machine, was looking at an OS listing and found a delay loop that was executed by a timer interrupt every 100th of a second. Removing it brought the performance up, but they had to replace one of the chips in the machine that wasn't fast enough. ------------------------------ In a similar vein, the GE 415 and 425 CPUs were identical except that the 415 had an extra wire that slowed the clock down a bit. To upgrade to the 425, after paying your money, the wire was removed. Some users knew about this, and one of them made up a realistic looking letter, supposedly from GE saying something to the effect: "CAUTION. Do not remove the wire from pin 4AB to 7FL in the CPU enclosure. This wire is located approximately 7 inches up from the bottom of the back plane in bay 2 and should not be removed by using a GE 112-3 wire unwrapping tool, first not removing the wrapping from 4AB, then pulling the wire from under the other wiring to its bound end at 7FL, followed by not unwrapping the bound end from 7FL. Not removing this wire will result in the normal clockspeed which is 1.6 times slower than with the wire removed and will not cause corresponding increases in system throughput." Naturally most of these wires got removed. ------------------------------ Another interesting but kludgy fix to a problem came from a user of an IBM 7044. The 7044 had a HALT instruction that stopped the CPU clock. The user was doing some realtime processing, or something of the sort, and didn't like the idea of the CPU ever being able to stop itself. He asked IBM how much it would cost to disable the instruction and they gave him some large quote which contained the implicit message, "We don't want to do it and this price is set high enough to make you change your mind about the request." The user didn't want to pay the money, so he fixed up a photodiode over the light on the console that was on when the CPU was running and hooked it up to a solenoid that would push the RUN button whenever the light went out. The cost was a couple of dollars. ------------------------------ Bloom's story about Weizenbaum and ELIZA is close, but the person involved was Daniel Bobrow, not Weizenbaum. The account was described in the December 1968 issue of the SIGART Newsletter, and was reprinted in the book Machines Who Think, by Pamela McCorduck (p. 225). The following is the description of the account: "One Saturday morning about 9 A.M., a BBN vice-president in charge of selling our Telcomp commercial service arrived at our PDP-1 computer room hoping to be able to use the computer for a demonstration. He found a note on the PDP-1 teletype that read: `TYPE ALL MESSAGES INTO THIS TELETYPE, AND END THEM WITH A PERIOD'. This note was left there by one of the programming bums who had just succeeded in making run a Lisp version of the DOCTOR program (based on ELIZA as developed by Weizenbaum). However, the VP thought that this note indicated that this teletype was linked with the one in my [Bobrow's] home, since I often used the computer all night. Therefore, he started typing to `me', but in fact was typing to this version of the DOCTOR program. The following conversation ensued: VP: Do you think that I can use the computer this morning? TELETYPE: Why do you ask? VP: I might be able to make some additional telcomp sales. TELETYPE: Why aren't you sure? VP: My prospective customers have never seen a demonstration of the system. TELETYPE: Does this mean very much to you? VP: Of course it does. TELETYPE: You seem very positive of that. VP: This is ridiculous. TELETYPE: What do you mean this is ridiculous? VP: Is there any reason why I can't use the computer now? TELETYPE: Tell me more about your prospective customers. VP: Please dial me up on 491-1850 Note that after that remark the VP did not obey instructions and left out the period. Therefore, of course, the computer didn't answer him. This so infuriated the VP, who thought I was playing games with him, that he called me up, woke me from a deep sleep, and said: VP: Why are you being so snotty with me? BOBROW: What do you mean, why am I being snotty to you? The VP angrily read the dialog that `we' had been having, and couldn't get any response but laughter from me. It took me a while to convince him it really was the computer". ------------------------------ TRUE STORY: Years ago while working on a large Amdahl 470/6 running DOS & MVS under VM, the system crashed, but gave a system error code xxxxxx. Upon looking it up in the systems manual (not an Amdahl manual) it said. A SYSTEM ERROR HAS JUST OCCURRED WHICH WAS PREVIOUSLY THOUGHT TO BE IMPOSSIBLE. ------------------------------ One of the benefits I get from living in Iowa City is that many of my students have worked for one or the other of the local divisions of Rockwell International. One of them, who had worked for the Government Avionics Division, on the Global Positioning System project related the following tale to me: Global Positioning System receivers are boxes that use information broadcast by a system of satellites to deduce the latitude, longitude, and altitude of the receiver. These boxes are built into a variety of weapons systems now in use by the United States and its allies. The box contains a radio receiver to listen to the satellites, and a fairly powerful computer to interpret the radio signals. The computers in the current production GPS receivers are programmed in Jovial, although a new generation programmed in Ada will no doubt appear someday. My student was part of one of the teams that maintained the GPS code. After some time on the job, he began to realize that the code his team maintained was never executed and had never been executed in the memory of any team member. That is, an entire team of programmers was being paid to maintain dead code. Despite the fact that the code was dead, the team was required to produce the entire range of documents supporting each release of the code, and they were required to react to various engineering change requests. Not too surprisingly, my student became demoralized and left the company, but not before learning enough to make the following hypothesis about how his situation had come to be. He guesses that, once upon a time, there was a prototype GPS system where his module actually served some purpose and came to be executed from time to time. The structure of this system was presumably used to define Rockwell's contractual relationship to the Department of Defense, and as a result, his module gained a legal standing that was quite independent of its function in the GPS system. As time passed, the actual calls to procedures in his module were eliminated from the GPS system, for one reason or another, until the code was dead. At first, nobody knew it was dead. The project was big enough that it wasn't uncommon for the people working on one module to have at best infrequent communication with those who called the procedures in the module, and engineering change notices that required changes to the module kept everybody busy. Engineering change notices would not have arrived if the actual structure of the program were used to determine who needed to participate in a change. In fact, the notices were distributed based on many other criteria, including the contractual descriptions of the modules. The team was quite busy keeping their code up with the changes, testing changes using locally developed scaffolding, and waiting for any report of failures from the global system tests. The discovery that the code was dead appears to have resulted from its passing global system tests even when it was obviously in error. Once my student found that the code was dead, he asked his managers why his efforts were being wasted on it. Their answer was that it was less expensive to maintain dead code than it was to rewrite the contract with the Department of Defense to eliminate the job. Douglas W. Jones, Department of Computer Science, University of Iowa ------------------------------------------------------------ 1995 Copyright by Henry Cate III All Rights Reserved The above collection can be forwarded for non commercial use as long as the signature file below is included The individual entries of the Life Collection are owned by the individual contributors who should be contacted if you wish to forward their entry. -- Henry Cate III [cate3@netcom.com] To learn how to get a MS Windows 3.1 Application with 15,000 jokes from the Life Humor collection, send E-Mail to life@netcom.com with "Info" in the Subject. Or check out http://www.offshore.com.ai/lifehumor
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