There is no honor among RAM thieves – but sometimes there is karma Welcome to the working week, dear readers, and good luck navigating whatever it brings – a task we hope to illuminate with a fresh instalment of Who, Me?, the reader-contributed column in which you share tales of the times you weren't at your best but managed to get away with it. This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as " …
Speaking of that manager, Bryce learned that he was forced to dip into the pool of spare machines.
He can't have been a true manager or he'd have ordered the fastest workstation available and then done nothing with it apart from a bit of email and Powerpoint on it...
The state of the other employees' computers -->
Excellent revenge on the overzealous manager.
It reminds me of the time I got a replacement machine at work. As I was into fairly hefty image processing work, my old machine was not considered fast enough. It was, however quite a bit more powerful than my home desktop, so I asked the admins what they were going to do with the old one. The answer was that the would have to dispose of the old machine, but if I would want to "volunteer" in the disposal task this, that was OK. The machine I liberated was unusual in that it used RDRAM, and only 2 out of 4 slots were in use. I noticed an identical machine was slated for disposal, and asked the admins if I could liberate that RAM as well, which they kindly allowed. The machine worked neatly for many a year at home.
It really helps to be good friends with the admins
Back in that era I was living with a teacher. She was given a cheap laptop by her school which was rather slow. The school would only pay for a minuscule bit of IT support and apparently the guy was very unhelpful so she asked me to see what I could do.
I looked at her machine and it only had 512MB of RAM and was paging constantly, so I suggested trying popping a bit more memory in and unsurprisingly it was much nicer to use. Word got out amongst the other teachers so they went and spent their own money on making their computers usable!
At my $employer -1 they had new owners who decided it was time to bring the IT up to date, so a nice HP server with Unix and a new ERP system arrived (very successfully) and most people got brand spanking new Dell desktops.
Only problem was whilst these had Pentium chips, they were only 200MHz, NT4 and Office 97 and the absolute minimum RAM (ok it was the early 90's so the exact combo might be a bit fuzzy in my memory) . And they ran like dogs.
Could not do a thing to upgrade them as they has propriety $DELL cases, $DELL PSU, $DELL memory, cpu soldered to the board which was also $DELL.
All because they wanted the cheapest thing going.
By donating your unwanted office furniture and tech through the Business2Schools charity we are able to make state schools in the UK an even better experience for children and students.
If we help improve the infrastructure in schools, provide them with faster computers and help create a more aspirational environment, our children will be inspired. If we are more ethical about recycling our children will benefit.
I read something that the average teacher in the US spends about $1000 out of pocket each year for classroom related stuff the school won't cover. Considering their already meager salaries, that's just terrible. But wouldn't want to raise taxes on anyone else to pay for it, especially not those claimed to be "creating jobs".
They have to do that here in Quebec too...
Teachers paying for any art materials for their elementary school students, among other things, that the school boards just won't cover.
During teacher appreciation week the school board wouldn't pay for a staff luncheon, so my wife and I provided lunch for 40 teachers and staff at my kids' elementary school, for 8 years.
We laid on 3 course meals, including vegan and Kosher options, all home cooked by my wife and paid for out of our pockets.
We figured it was the least we could do, given they were teaching our two kids!
Wanted to vote you up for helping out, and as several other commentards have opined it is twisted she needed to buy the RAM out of her own pocket. I don't know how to vote that sad truth down other than with my own comment.
I'd heard an adage that a company is soon to meet its demise when the beancounters have taken over. Seems that's the state of our education system in several English-speaking countries.
As a clever, but unwise and bastardly man once said: "If the government has control over our children today, they control our country's future".
What the hell are we engineering ourselves into?
Well yes, England ( don't know about the other UK bits) is essentially a Behaviourist training model. Give the kids the skills to pass a few tests,proving the government are achieving some target or other, and make sure that employers have a supply of usable wage slaves, who can follow instructions and do simple tasks as required.
I worked for a tech company, as a Software Developer. The head of the IT department was, to be blunt, useless. Mid 2010s and he's still ordering laptops with spinning rust in them, in spite of protests from everyone in the Software Development teams.
I ended up paying out of my own pocket for an SSD, cloned my HDD onto it, and voila, local build and test runs now take less than one tenth of the time, productivity improves, happy days. And now we've got the hard and fast proof that an SSD will "pay for itself" for most users in a matter of days. Thankfully that was enough for the powers that be to force the head of the IT department to change his procurement policy for new laptops. And I managed to find a friendly project manager who had built up a contingency slush fund on one of his projects (that I was doing some work on) and was only too happy to let me expense the SSD. Win-win.
Sometimes you've got to take matters into your own hands...
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still have a spreadsheet i used to determine memory costs, but 2 gigs ram cost $4847. 16 128 meg dimms. for a server. Could be pretty expensive to upgrade memory, but at least an upgrade was available. won't be long before no one offers either memory upgrades or disk upgrades. Usually found that paging was a given with xp until you got at least 3 gig ram. with 64 bit systems you can run into paging in windows with 8 gigs ram. just not enough sometimes, and i remember when 4 megs was an incredible amount of ram. it was also all that you could put in the machine.
I had a manager who did something very similar - except we knew what had happened.
It was a similar exercise, swapping a DIM module from a retired machine into a live one - something I'd normally have done but my boss, the IT Manager, decided he'd do it himself. He did comment, as he turned the machine back on, that the DIMM was a bit tight but he'd managed to get it in, I wasn't quite quick enough to shout, "Stop!" The inevitable puff of smoke from the machine signalled that he'd failed to seat the module correctly - in fact he's installed it completely the wrong way round and it was only half in the socket. He learnt his lesson and left future hardware changes to me!
It is surprising how a supposedly intelligent person can be so incapable of managing such things.
My own brother-in-law, who is an engineer btw, tried last year to self-upgrade his PC. He bought all the right components, motherboard, CPU, RAM, cooler, SSDs, etc, and put everything together.
When it didn't work, he called me, because he knew that I have extensive experience in upgrading my hardware. I tried to diagnose by phone what appeared to be a RAM problem. We tried removing all but one stick, putting the sticks in different slots, all to no avail.
Bereft of ideas, I asked him to remove all the DIMMS and try to boot. We got the same error, ergo it was not the RAM. At that point, I pointed him to a very good PC Repair shop because, if it was the motherboard, I didn't have any other solution.
It turns out that my brother-in-law had put the CPU in wrong. Which means he forced it in, because slotting in CPUs these days is as easy as just gently dropping it in place. All you need to do is align the marked tab on the CPU with the tab on the motherboard and drop it in. But no, he put it in wrong, forced it down and screwed the cooler over it. Obviously, the CPU was dead and the motherboard as well.
When I learned what had happened, I was speechless. But, that is how it is. He's far from stupid, but boy was he stupid there.
It's sometimes hard to know how much force is appropriate!
When I was but a mere student I was building myself a PC with an AMD Athlon (1.2GHz!) of which I was both very proud and very cautious - people had been known to crack the CPU die when installing the heatsink on that family of processors.
However, I hadn't even reached that point as I'd carefully aligned the CPU with the ZIF socket and closed the locking lever... which stopped half-way down, apparently binding on something.
Hours of careful removal, inspection, re-insertion followed - everything *looked* right but the resistance on that lever didn't *feel* right.
Then my housemate casually looked in and said "Oh! You just need to close the lever." and, to my dumbstruck horror, did so. I heard the terrifying click of... apparently, a ZIF socket locking neatly into place exactly as it was supposed to.
> It's sometimes hard to know how much force is appropriate!
Giving people experience of the correct feel could be a good use for old dead hardware.
I've never actually managed a PC in this manner, but it has been nerve-racking on occasion. And I did once fail to apply sufficient force to a ribbon cable connector on a 3D printer board.
"Giving people experience of the correct feel could be a good use for old dead hardware."
Depends how old. I well remember crappy heatsink retainers requiring inordinately large amounts of force to get the hook over the clip. Enough that the slightest slip could (and probably did in some cases!) cause damage to the board as the pry tool (or screwdriver) then rams into the system board. Even some RAM, SIMMS/DIMMS seem to require quite some force to get in even when have got them the right way around.
At college. IT Course. Hardware module. Formal test with marks that count against the final grade. Disassemble and reassemble a PC.
I am near the end of the list with a few people having done the task before me on that hardware. I disassemble and reassemble. We turn it on and do the various checks to confirm everything is working.
When we get to testing the floppy drive *cough* the lecturer says "you can skip that one, the floppy drive is broken". I run the test anyway. Pass. Surprised lecturer asks me to run it again. I tell him I thought I had bent the pins disassembling it, so bent them back without him noticing when I was reassembling it... He had to figure out who to deduct marks from.
Back in the early days of my career I worked at a Computer Repair outfit in South Wales (capitalisation intended). Apparently when the boss came in one morning a customer machine was waiting to be rebuilt and he took it upon himself to replace the RAM and get it ready to go out.
When my colleagues came in he reported that the machine had a faulty motherboard and RAM. They checked and saw that he had forced the RAM in the wrong way around. I didn't know it was possible to do that but apparently with enough force you can get a DIMM in that way but it has a catastrophic effect. He denied this had happened but stopped helping out in the repair shop afterwards.
He wasn't incapable, in fact he'd started the business doing all roles but somewhere along the way he'd lost the attention to detail required to do it properly.
I wanted a laptop for home (all my machines were desktop). So I asked our Wintel team (who managed old laptop refreshes) if there was an employee scheme to purchase old hardware. I was very pleasantly surprised when he told me to just take it, as it was cheaper for him to give me the laptop than it was to pay to dispose of it.
Another place I worked they apparently had storage units full of old laptops. They didn't have a disposal process in place - which was intriguing for a large Indian outsourcing company, but on the flip side hardly surprising.....
When working for a now defunct arm of a large national energy company, staff were graciously allowed to *buy* redundant PCs and screens. These were fairly cheap but also quite elderly, in many cases the CRT monitors had burn-in issues (I grabbed one for a server). The "high end" kit was to be redeployed in other branches of the company, so I asked if I could keep my on call PC as it was a little better than my own desktop at the time. I was given the OK and my mighty machine (4gb RAM, 386 running Windows 3.11) was saved from the outside storage cage where the rest of the better spec machines ended up.
not sure that's true. 386sx was limited to 16 megs but the 386 had a full 32 bit address bus. 2^32=4Gigs i believe. often motherboards didn't support anything close to that, but that's not the cpu's fault. most of them also came installed on motherboards with isa busses, limits you to 16 megs also. Some 386 computers had a custom bus that allowed addressing custom memory cards. zenith did that. Still took discrete memory chips so sockets had to be filled with 64 bit chips or256 if they were available. don't remember what the maximum memory was for that system. dimms came later on motherboards so isa wasn't needed for memory expansion. don't think i ever saw more than 4 megs or ram on a 386 or sx system.
For the SX 16 MB sounds plausible. But the normal i386DX was limited to 64 MB real RAM, not virtual address space. Not enough address lines / banks for more (if I recall correctly).
Some crazy one recently made custom SIMMS to actually get that maximum.
I doubt anyone needed a 386 with 64 MB RAM anyway, even in 486-time it was rare and mostly on servers.
This term, "RAM raid" made me laugh. Or sob.
As an ex-IT mgr, the workplace looting habits of some make me climb the curtains in rage.
So many times, I've found some unique and not free items went missing in the workplace: shared meeting rooms Jabra, cables, etc ...
It's just like people, during (and after) Covid, thought they could just loot the workplace, so as they would WFH just like in the office !
But the poor idiot who needs to get the inventory back doesn't have a magic budget for "looted kit" !
One final story after this rant:
I was supporting the move of 700 staff for a large organisation. Big bang move. Basically, we had planned to have the 700 desktops cabled, with a docking station, one screen, etc ... all ready for the laptop of users to be plugged and working.
700 desktops, all with the same screen + docking station.
Everything went according to plan and all people were able to work at day 1.
One week after, we began to receive calls that "my desk is missing its screen". Weird, as all 700 desks had been configured the same with the same screen.
Going on the spot, we quickly discovered that every corner we had with, say, 3 missing screens, we also had 3 active desktops with ... dual screens.
This was to the point we would vocally exclame "weird, mate, we have 3 missing screens here, and look, those 3 dudes have dual screens, how cool is that ?". Needless to say, said dudes had their face quite pale ...
You wrote "Their recent pleas for submissions heavily imply that."
In reply to YAAc's comment "You don't mean strategic reserves of computer fsck-ups have run dry ?"
Implying that WhoMe has only recently started calling for user created stories for publication.
Which is not true. WhoMe has been calling for user submissions since the year dot ... Here's the first episode of this series:
https://www.theregister.com/2018/01/22/who_me/
Near as I can tell, every single episode in the last 6 and a half years has contained similar language in the final paragraph.
So no, not "recent".
In the last several months, WhoMe and OnCall have been making more strident calls for submission than usual, including specific claims that their supply is running dry.
Example: https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/17/who_me/
"If you've found a novel use for a tool – whether meant for computer use or not – we'd really like to hear about it. Click here to send an email to Who, Me? and we may immortalize your tale on some future Monday. The mailbag's getting a tad sparse, so we could really use some stories."
You've misread the story.
First of all - this story is a confession of misconduct.
There was an "informal practice", evidently not approved, of putting aside the PC of staff leaving, but pulling the RAM to upgrade a PC in use from 2 GB to 4 GB. "Bryce" did this for himself.
At Christmas "a manager" apparently had some or all of the office PCs checked for, and stripped of, these unapproved upgrades.
And broken, in several cases, including Bryce's. The 2GB RAM was fine, the rest of the PC was dead for some reason.
So "Bryce" took the working PC from "a manager" and left his own under the manager's desk.
I think it's important to note that (1) this left "Bryce" with 2 GB, so either "a manager" was using 2 GB - or not using the PC at all - or else "Bryce" left 4 GB in the not-working PC.
"A manager" got one of the stored PCs out, so that was solved...
But it would have been safer for "Bryce" to get one of the stored PCs - unless they are locked away - instead of stealing the PC from "a manager".
Also - if anyone checks which numbered PC asset is on which desk, then "Bryce" will be in a not-working condition again.
Maybe they didn't keep track of assets properly... as is implied by raiding the furloughed PCs for RAM upgrades for other people.
I can't count the number of times I've swapped the Boss's top of the line CPU[0], gathering dust and spiderwebs under his credenza/return, artfully changing screensavers every couple minutes, for his secretary's underpowered kit ... without the Boss noticing. Was actually quite common back in the day.
As always, the Secretary will disavow any knowledge of your actions ...
[0] Actual CPU (and RAM) sometimes, sometimes the entire motherboard, sometimes the entire box.
Always a good tactic to be on the good side of (and preferably owed a few favours by) the secretariat. Both within industry and even more so in academia.
They are one quarter of the holy quartet (secretaries, storesmen, technician and security).
If you can be on good terms with those, you can get absolutely anything done (or alternatively get away with anything) as they are the ones who *actually* run the place...
At a place I worked, there was a strict hierarchy of job titles and computer-power. The Head Cheese got the newest, most powerful PC, and underlings got less-powerful models.
Thus, there was rarely such thing as replacing a single PC. If Middle-Manager Mary got a new PC due to a budgeted upgrade, her somewhat-less-powerful old PC would go to Middle-Assistant-Manager Mike, and so on and so forth. This was during Windows 3.X/Windows 9X days. Techies had to interview each user to determine where the user's data was (against official policy -- data was supposed to be kept on network drives) squirrelled away on their C: drive, then copy it to their "new" computer. We'd start both computers on the network, then run Frye Utilities' nice TUI copy program, which sent the data over raw SPX. For non-networked PCs we'd use LapLink.
A single new computer could result in 20~30 "pushdown" migrations. Gods! The time we wasted doing that! Everyone was so jealous of their "PC status" that any box-swapping would have been instantly noticed. We used Compaq PCs at that time; only techies had the Torx screwdrivers needed to open those boxes, and I never heard of any RAM-raiding incidents.
Icon for time-wasting, ego-driven managers.
I would have added up the number of hours a single migration typically takes, multiplied it by the number of migrations a single PC purchase causes, then multiplied that by the loaded per hour cost of the people doing this migrations.
Then placed that on the CEO's desk, and tell him whatever a new PC costs add this to it because that's how much extra work their crazy policies cause. If it is as bad as you say, they might have been able to buy 3 or 4 PCs for the price of 1 if they weren't doing all the unnecessary step down migrations.
In schools ( early days of school computing) the one and only PC frequently sat unused in a head's office while the admin, teachers etc. would rely on a (probably portable) typewriter.
The expemsive asset was totally wasted, because the head couldn't use it and was terrified of letting anyone else, because it was so expensive.
I worked at a strangely now defunct technical consultancy which had a strict no-hierarchy policy.
Everyone got the same latest model when they were hired.
This meant that engineers that had been there a few years had lower spec machines than the new receptionist.
This also meant a lot of upgrades were purchased on behalf of clients and somehow never transferred at the end of a project.
On 2nd thoughts, this might have been a cunning plan
Depending in the hardware configuration "Bryce" had 3.7 to 3.9 GB RAM available to the OS. Which is a big boost for XP 32 Bit from 2 GB. On top, I bet, the mainboard utilized interleaving. Nearly doubling the RAM throughput (i.e. 10% to 30% more real speed due to interleaving alone).
Why not exactly 4 GB? You remember the himem.sys / above 640 KB thing since the GFX-cards memory was mapped there? Yeah, that same goes for the 4 GB barrier, allocated from the top down. AMD64 OS-es simply relocate/remap the RAM used by those PCI(e) cards to make it all available to the OS. And I ignore those special Server 2000/20033 32 bit versions which COULD access > 4 GB RAM since I've never seen one in reality.
Was a teenager at the time and my first PC with >= 4GB was running 64bit OSes already, but IIRC Windows XP Pro 32-bit has off-by-default PAE support (magic intel instructions available on every -- most? -- i686-and-up CPUs to address up to 64GB of RAM iff the OS/software has been coded for it[1]). Wouldn't have helped/made sense for 4GB of RAM as it incurs a performance penalty, but it was there.
[1]: The quick n' dirty explanation is that it sort-of works like segmentation: you get an additional 4-bit memory addressing register; apps/OS can then address up to 64 GB of RAM in 4GB chunks. Programs not coded for PAE will run, but can only address/access 4GB of RAM.
We used to have an annual budget for new test systems for the QA lab. Any systems ordered were always specced to the max: twin large disks, full RAM, nice screens. Needless to say all the 'extra' components found their way into developers' desktop systems fairly quickly. After all, a QA lab system is fine with a tired low-res screen, and it only needs a disk big enough to hold the software under test & logs. I'm sure our managers were aware of this, but turned a blind eye to the "perks" as long as they weren't pushed too far.
When I worked in a QA team, we needed the most powerful boxen as we used Windows VirtualPC which was a bit of a monster back then, especially whilst emulating Windows XP and an Oracle DB...
One of the last things I worked on there was moving some of the stuff to VMs on proper host servers.
I once knew someone I worked with who needed a new computer, and having lots of bits from work, cases, RAM and everything I put together a good computer for him, much better than the old heap of slow junk that he was trying to use. A week later I went back to see him and the new computer was running poorly... turned out that rather than have one good computer that worked he had decided to take all the RAM out and distribute it evenly between a few computers so in the end he had four awful computers instead of one good one and three awful computers. Just can't help some people...
RAM used to be very expensive. In the early 90s we paid something like £60 to upgrade our home 386sx from 2 to 4 MB, All the better to play Doom. That was one of the cheaper upgrades. 128 MB could cost as much as a small car. Theft of RAM was also very common. I heard of one place where someone had a case lock to prevent people from stealing it. He was quite proud of it when burglars stole the RAM from all the machines except his. He wasn't so amused when most of the office had their damaged 286s replaced with 486s, except for his.
£60 for 2MB - what a bargain!
When I started, additional RAM for the DEC VAX came on 1MB cards, at around £1,000 each.
On the other hand we had to quickly learn very efficient programming, which sometimes meant ignoring everything we'd been taught. When I worked at the local college (now Uni) we had one simple game program that we used as part of our "introduction to computers" sessions, but which came top of the league for page faulting. I had a look and, quite properly, the original programmer had put a simple subroutine in for a bit of code that was called twice per iteration. All very elegant, but the length of the program meant the subroutine caused a page fault every time it was called. Moving the code to inline (twice) meant that the iterative part of the program would sit in a single memory page and took far fewer resources.
1 MB? Luxury! Try living with 64K on RSX-11 when every page of Pascal generates 0.5k of object code. Wrangling overlays was the art of the day, but most people had no clue, especially when they coded great globs of "common" code that just sat in RAM. If I say so myself, I came up with some neat ways of dealing with that. Moving to the VAX was like sloughing off a strait-jacket.
I have a hand-written receipt[0] dated early December of 1977 for "8ea 16 Kbit Mostek MK4116 DRAM, new, in factory tube, with seals" ... for the low, low price of $336, plus tax. So I guess one question to the "42" answer is "What was the price in US dollars for 1 (one) 16K bit DRAM in late 1977?" ...
By way of reference, $42 in 1977 money is just about 218 bucks today.
[0] From the late, very much lamented Haltec, no less ...
Pharma Karma Tales.
Had a guy in a department stick in a request for PC in a now decommissioned building to be deployed to his desk in another building & was crowing over his "new" PII 400MHz device over his colleagues PII 266MHz machines.
That "crowing" lasted about 3 weeks when I rolled up with P4's for the rest of his department, he tried to back peddle saying where was his "allocated" machine & was most unhappy when told his originally allocated machine had been re-assigned as his now current machine was no longer eligible as we only got about 90% of the machines flagged for refresh, the remaining 10% would be absorbed by the
ongoing departures as the plant was downsizing.
The following year I arrived with his new machine & he was crowing again on my arrival & was rather deflated very quickly when I pointed out that it was the same spec machine, but due to the use of a generic driver for the new boards IDE controller for NT4.0 it actually ran about a third slower (Network imaging of the previous years machines could be done in about 40 mins, his machine 1 hour 20 mins).
Reminds me of the time that the best manager I ever worked for helped me out of a hole by assisting me in what was basically RAM theft in the 1990s.
There were three of us working as coders when Lloyds Bank pulled the plug on the company, I believe to fund the cocaine and prostitute habits of some of its managers. The other two coders were employees so got a nice redundancy payment, I was a freelancer and was left with about 5 grand in unpaid invoices.
The project we were working on was heavy multimedia, so we were using stonking Mac workstations with the maximum RAM possible, way way more than your average PC. After he had announced the bad news (he lost his job as well) the manager took me aside and said how unfair my situation was, but he had a plan. He helped me open up the Macs and take out all the extra RAM they had installed, leaving just enough for the system to boot and sent me out the door with pocketfuls of chips.
Selling those in the following months didn't claw back the whole 5k but it kept the wolf from the door in what was a challenging situation.
Best manager that I ever worked for. He had the ability to judge progress and trust a worker, so I started my WFH career in the days before home internet access was a thing, using a combination of direct modem link to a PC in their office and WinFax Pro on Windows 3.
A portion of Old company got acquired, and as part of the deal all hardware needed to returned to the remains of Old company. That meant giving up my "Power user" spec laptop (which I had further upgraded out-of-pocket) for New company's "lowest bidder" spec laptop. Obviously that in unacceptable!
Found a dirt cheap matching laptop on eBay. It would boot to a fresh BIOS every time, and no amount of changing the CMOS battery would get the settings to survive a power cycle. The laptop display, however, worked just fine. A savvy person might notice that Old company's asset tag sticker was on the display panel, not on the underlying hardware.
A few minutes with a handy how-to YouTube video, and the displays were swapped. Old company's asset was duly returned to the satisfaction of all.
(And before there is any gnashing of teeth about security issues, the drives were wiped and a fresh OS loaded. Totally in self-interest. 1) I do not want custody of any potentially private information, and 2) that was the only way to be assured all of IT's spyware management software was properly removed.)
Before ram was little chips with legs, there was this stuff called "core". Little donuts of ferrite that had wires (usually 3 or 4) stringed in them. When upgrading our machine from 64k bytes (16k words) to 80k bytes (20k words), I knew that the then operating system would automatically size memory and use all of it. Wanting the new operating system to be used, which took up a bit more memory, but less than the increment we had just purchased, I had an idea. Make the "auto size" function stick to the older size, and say that the only way to use the new memory was to use the new operating system. It was a wonderful plan. A few flips of switches (yes, it had those!), and the disk was modified to lock in the old size memory. The new memory arrived (it was a pretty big beast if you want to know), and was installed. The memory diagnostic was run and it showed that the new memory and the old was working perfectly. The (old) operating system was booted, and it only made the old memory size functional. Everything was going to plan. I told the boss (I was a PFY at the time) that to use the more memory we needed to use the new operating system. Time passed, and for some reason the disk (with the memory locked version on it) died. So I dutifully setup the new operating system, and wrote a blurb (one page) to explain the changed needed for the users to get the same results as before. It worked perfectly. Then my boss said, "Why didn't you restore from the last dump tape" which was in a drawer I had forgotten about. Oh, dear. That version of the old operating system DIDN'T have the memory lock patch. Not good. We tried a restore and it worked, but I did some smooth talking to use the new operating system. As Ricky said "You got a lot of 'splaning to do". Thankfully things did resolve and we went to the new operating system and all was good in the end. I lasted another few years, until the machine slowly became obsolete. I still miss that machine.
Yes, over 50 years ago! I'm getting old!
I've got a 256K[0] memory array from an IBM S/360 Model 50 in storage. It is not mounted in a frame. It weighs about 500 pounds, and is roughly the size of a three drawer file cabinet. My failing memory suggests it draws about 3,500 Watts just ticking over, mostly to keep it up to temperature.
0] I just looked at the paperwork ... more specifically, it's from an H50 and has 262,144 "bytes" (words) of Core, and I was right about the 3,500W.
"Back in the Day" we (or rather the users) were using a program called SuperStress to review a bridge - but it was somewhat bigger than normal.
We ended up having to temporarily strip every PC in the vacinity so the chap doing the work had the massive 32mb required to get the job done.
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