discrete transistors

From: Huw Davies <H.Davies_at_latrobe.edu.au>
Date: Mon Oct 26 01:58:24 1998

At 10:31 AM 21-10-98 -0400, Allison J Parent wrote:

>I was told a story about an old 700 series where the cooling water for
>the rooms chiller found a leak. The leak was in the hundreds of gallons
>a minute rate. Oh, the 700 series is a vacuum tube machine so the under
>floor cable troughs have data and power cables galore. Seems the machine
>was still running fine when water started gushing out the bottom pannels
>of the racks. All the interconnection cables and PS units were soaked and
>it still ran! They shut down, fixed the pipe and dried the room and fired
>everything back up no problem.

Well, in a vain attempt to out brag Allison:

In a previous job we had a very nice computer room which was in the "old
style", that is, all glass walls so the important people could look in and
see where their money had gone to (In reality, it was this way to allow
light into another area, but I prefer the other explanation :-).

I was at home one night and the phone rang - it was the building manager
calling to ask if water in the computer room was a problem :-( Apparently
the cooling water to the computer room air conditioner had escaped. I set a
new record in the home to work run. Arriving in my office it was clear that
we had about 12 inches of water in the room. The spray off the fans in the
back of our "main" MicroVAX-II (in the large H9624? cabinet) was
impressive.... Foolishly I opened the computer room door to go switch
things off (the water was about 4C). I didn't manage to electrocute myself
and turned things off. Unfortunately, the cold water contaminated the mouse
rooms which were directly below the computer room, leading to the
destruction of about $10K of mice (it was a biomolecular research institute).

It seems a in-line filter had failed in the cold water system. It was
replaced. Ten days later it failed again......

 Huw Davies | e-mail: Huw.Davies_at_latrobe.edu.au
 Information Technology Services | Phone: +61 3 9479 1550 Fax: +61 3 9479 1999
 La Trobe University | "If God had wanted soccer played in the
 Melbourne Australia 3083 | air, the sky would be painted green"
Received on Mon Oct 26 1998 - 01:58:24 GMT