Keeping printers quiet broke disk drives, thanks to very fuzzy logic Welcome once more to the Friday frolic that is On Call, The Register's forum for your tales of heroic rescues achieved against the odds. This week, meet a reader we'll regomize as "Darren," who shared a story of his time in a Philadelphia hospital in the 1970s. Darren was not in the hospital to be healed! Rather, he was …
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In the mid 80's my first job was as a civil servant, my office had formerly been used for the printers so had acoustic tiles on the walls. It was a rule that you couldn't pin, or use Sellotape to attach, anything to office walls but I got away with it as I could pin to the fibre tiles without leaving any damage.
It was useful, too. One of my projects involved getting serial plotters to work alongside the VT-220 terminals on a single connection which we duly achieved and were able to start producing graphs out of the VAX system which were invaluable to some of the users.
Used to use a Calcomp 8 pen plotter about 6' wide for chip layout. Hypnotic to watch and a pen would almost always run out when you needed a plot in a hurry - they were made of brass so you could only guess how much ink was in them by how heavy they felt.
Spent a rather unpleasant time on evening when it ate my tie and had to wait for the security guard to do his rounds and set me free!
IIRC, I used the GINO plot libraries from Fortran (VAX) to plot surfaces - the output being sent to a Calcomp plotter at a different site* - so, never saw the thing in action, but would get the rolled output a day or so later.
*Kingston Polytechnic's Engineering campus which at the time was at Canbury Park**.
**The institution had a 21 year lease on the former Hawker factory site...
In the 80s our spanking new PC came with a dot-matrix printer. We were allowed the PC in the lab, but the printer had to go in the secretary's office - which was outside the boss's inner sanctum. As we used it more we badgered him for a laserjet, but they were expensive and the boss was tight. What convinced him was printing a large document using a near-letter-quality programme.
Still in use by a mate of mine. Printer was rescued from the WEE bin because no parallel ports on PCs anymore, I still had one at home. A couple of years later I rescued a better printer & passed the 5p onto my mate.
The last time I dealt with it was advising said mate to buy a USB to parallel cable after his PCI Parallel port finally failed.
IIRC there was a nylon gear in the original "HP LaserJet" printer that would eventually dry out and crack. It was a custom part and you couldn't buy it alone: You had to buy the whole assembly for big $$$.
I knew a guy who had a machine shop and made a lot of those gears so the early Laserjet could be fixed for very little money: It was a very good side hustle for him.
This sounds like the point where solidly built, but no longer serviceable laser printers meet cheapo 3D printers...
IIRC, the old office laserjets (I can't remember the exact model) had another issue, where the rubber bushes in the paper feed would wear down on one side, eventually leading to mis-feeds and jams. The service engineer who was called to my old place of work confided in me that the solution was to use a pair of pliers to give these bushes a quarter-turn on their axle and then come back and do it again in another couple of years' time.
> IIRC, they were capable of doing A3 in duplex.
They were, but the big issue with a lot of those older machines was the slowness of the imaging processor. I had a 5si with the duplexer and maxed-out with memory (well, because I could) and it took forever to complete the memory test on start up. :D
And printing large A3 duplex documents took a while to think about. Very sturdy mind and extremely heavy.
These days I have an old Konica Minolta Bizhub 200 copier which prints very nicely and again, supports large paper format. Managed to get the large paper bin for the bottom off a parts machine. Again, although the quality is superb (after rebuilding the imaging unit), anything a bit complex takes a good while for it to think about, Postscript *or* PCL.
(told a couple of times before)
Big ad agency, open plan office, latest digital switchboard in the middle of the floor, engineer has cabinet open to make changes... passing idiot points and says "look at all those pretty light"... spark jumps from end of his finger and kills the switchboard stone dead!
The potted plants and uplighters may have meant they had to scrimp a bit and fit cheaper nylon carpets
...engineer has cabinet open to make changes... passing idiot points and says "look at all those pretty light"... spark jumps from end of his finger and kills the switchboard stone dead!
When I worked at <redacted> the carpet tiles were very effective as a means of acquiring some considerable static charge, particularly if one dragged one's feet across them rather than walking properly.
Approach secretary with outstretched finger, uttering the Magic Words those are nice earrings; the outcome was entirely predictable, at least to those with an understanding of physics.
In the changed times in which we live that would probably now result in instant dismissal...
I had an old Cossard Dual Beam all valve oscilloscope that I dropped a screw on and of course it slipped through an air hole. It weighed about 80lbs so I unplugged it and sat on the floor and took the case off, located the screw and then caught my cuff on something and managed to discharge the HT capacitor of its 4kv (IIRC) and launched the thing about 12' across the room tearing a few intercostal muscles. The scope survived its trip seemingly unharmed! It was still working 20 years later when I got rid of it.
A friend of mine had a vacation job in a factory that made cling film. Giants reels of the stuff, running over rollers, making an huge accidental van der Graaf generator that could knock grown men flying. They had large knives for cutting the stuff when reels got full and everyone learnt to have one firmly in hand when anywhere near the plastic, as they could discharge to the nearest metal through the knife tip and only feel a mild jolt in their hands.
Obviously I've never seen this place, but am going to guess that the rolling machine had a follower to help the stuff spool tightly. If the roller were made of a conductive metal instead of plastic, then it would discharge the static as it spun without burning holes in it.
But, I imagine they were using the static to hold the film in place, so diacharging the static would keep the film from staying tight on the roll.
At a previous job, if you were the last one out of the office you had to turn off the lights. By the time you got to the switches, you built up enough charge to pull about a 15mm arc.
I got in the habit of holding my car key in my left hand and reaching out to touch the tip of the key to a screw on the switchplate before touching the switch with my other hand. The resulting spark was pretty, and much less painful than when it originated from my fingertips.
Luckily my car was a ca. 1990 GM sedan, so the key was a dumb hunk of metal. Try that with a modern key fob and you'll be needing a replacement fob.
Used to accumulate* charge here in Alberta for a pastime, always the smart one, she would always try to discharge, on entering a building (or vehicle) with metal doors with the tip of her finger, rather than the more sensible hard slap of the palm to the surface.
One happy day (For me) while looking in a furnishings store looking at kitchen appliances, she pointed out a over the cooker extractor fan with the comment "Ohh look that's just like the one we have! as she reached out to point with her finger, a gigantic spark worthy of Michelangelo's "The creation of Adam" leapt from finger to metal was seen by myself reflected in the shiny stainless steel appliance I was looking at, with a massive shriek of pain.
One of my former electronic's tutors could blow semiconductors just by proximity, he had to discharge himself against the radiator before he dared kiss his wife hello/goodbye each day.
*Sorry not sorry.
I also worked somewhere the carpet was plastic, but not cheap since it had the company logo woven into it.
We had old style phones with plastic handsets and a metal insert for the loudspeaker. You could walk around, build up a charge, sit down and answer the phone without discharging.
First thing the caller hears is you swearing as the charge finds a way via your ear and the phone handset.
The company had someone who used to water the carpet to try to reduce the static generation.
The place where I first started had metal partitions with windows above the 4-foot mark.
The new carpet was a disaster. I reckoned that each step increased your charge by about 40V per step. It was 25 steps to the exit door, which was, of course, mostly metal.
I took to carrying a pencil, and doors acquired numerous silvery marks.
I once visited a friend's house to investigate the reason why his fancy Pentium tower system would crash.
Sure enough, after about 10 minutes it cut out. Next boot lasted 3 minutes.
Luckily the BIOS had a page showing temperatures. It showed a figure rising quickly. It never got to show the figure with a nought on the end because the screen went dark.
Cover removed, I found a layer of insulating fibres packed into the processor heatsink, sucked there by the associated fan.
The box was standing on what was obviously a new carpet, of a matching colour.
The vacuum cleaner came into play and Windows 95 could once again stay up for a whole evening.
(though we were off to the pub) ====>
"The box was standing on what was obviously a new carpet, of a matching colour."
As a field engineer, I came across that same problem at many customer sites. They were told it would be fixed but future call-outs would likely be chargeable as "user induced damage" if they didn't lift the PCs off the floor by at least 6"/15cm. Most of the dust is disturbed by peoples feet moving under the desk, but not by much. 6" seemed to be enough to more or less eliminate the problem.
> lift the PCs off the floor by at least 6"/15cm
I can confirm this. I recommend everyone to put the PC about 20 cm above ground. Reason is simple: Dust settles on the ground more than on any surface above ground. Cat hair too. Even worse if the PC sits in a corner.
During early PC roll out's we used to supply base unit stands which did exactly that, lifted the bases unit high enough to avoid sucking in dust. It had the secondary benefit or reducing the number of call outs caused by people 'accidentally' kicking over their base units.
When I was at uni, we were using mainframe computers with primary text input done via punched cards. One person -- likely a student who wasn't going to complete their computer class assignment by the deadline -- submitted a bogus deck containing mostly unused "punch-by-hand" cards. These were used for card-sorter tallying of survey responses. Each punch position was almost-but-not-completely punched through, and users would use a pen or pencil to completely punch out the appropriate hole. When this deck was read in by the mainframe's card reader, the powerful vacuum sucked all the chads out of the cards, filling the insides of the card reader, and bringing it to a halt. Thus, "the mainframe was down", and a deadline extension was granted to that class, at the expense of disabling card-based input to our primary mainframe for everyone else. It took them five hours to fix that card reader (we had three customer engineers on-site; they had their offices in our Computer Center).
I still remember when in the middle 80s, one of those (new at the time) monstrous IBM line printers -a 3203 or something similar- capable of spitting a huge number of bills an hour, was brought to my hometown's electricity company. Given my dad was a friend of the company's tech guy, he invited my then teenager self to witness its installation and the subsequent power on. Not much to do with tech/geekery in a small rural town back then. Oh, well...
Against all IBM's support staff advice, they insisted on having it in the middle of the office, which had one of those floating long pinotea boards parquet flooring, with the idea of using it to print all of the office's paperwork when it wasn't munching through the ~30k electricity bills a month it had been originally purchased for.
The printer was powered up, the first batch of electricity bills were queued for printing... and the all hell broke loose, as this single-bed sized, 600+ kg monster started trotting through the office floor. I still recall the secretaries and clerks climbing ont their desks as if they saw 1000 mice running into the building!
Cue in a fast solution: grab some L-shaped pieces of steel, and screw the printer to the beautiful pinotea flooring. And the previsible outcome: a mini-earthquake promptly started shaking and moving not just the printer at this time, but all the desks surrounding it.
Eventually, they decided to move the printer into its own, dedicated room, and calm returned to the office floor.
In the early nineties a council employed me partly to fix their seventies VDUs which kept breaking down, having to be chucked out. I took the back off one and inside it was a thick fur of sticky soot. I couldn't see the electronics at all so had to use a vacuum cleaner, and that was enough to get it working. That was enough to get 95% of them working. The IT director was so impressed that he allowed me to buy an oscilloscope, a function generator and a very expensive DVM - none of which I really needed, i just badly wanted them. In truth though the office vacuum cleaner was the essential tool.
It kind of put me off smoking, at least indoors at work. I'd often show the inside of the VDUs to office workers to encourage them to smoke outdoors, or quit.
I also realised these old beasts were chucking out radiation, so I sprayed the inside of the plastic back panels with conductive paint which I'd ground internally. Nobody asked me to do that, I was just a people person.
"I also realised these old beasts were chucking out radiation, so I sprayed the inside of the plastic back panels with conductive paint which I'd ground internally. Nobody asked me to do that, I was just a people person."
You ARE a nice guy. Some of us would have painted 5 of 6 sides with chrome paint and no grounding.
I think I've told this story before...
About 25 years ago - back in the days when we still had such luxuries as in-office admin people - we had a PC with a CD drive for our office gal, who was a fairly heavy smoker (the smoking was heavy, not the gal herself). Eventually the CD drive stopped working, and the IT department was consulted (at that point I was industrial service, not IT).
In due course, a new drive arrived at our office. No IT tech, no instructions, just a drive in a cardboard box. The office gal was aware that in a previous life I had "done something with computers", so asked me for help. No problem! Until I opened up the PC's case.
I could barely make out any of the innards, as everything was coated in a nasty mixture of carpet fibers and sticky nicotine residue. The computer was unplugged, taken out the back door and cleaned with compressed air before being (carefully) vacuumed. That at least made it possible to replace the CD drive. Everything else was wiped as clean as could be while in place, the PC was buttoned up and returned to service.
A short time later the law was changed to forbid smoking indoors, and sometime after that the lady in question moved on to greener (or not, as the case may be) pastures.
Icon for required PPE -->
A chain-smoker friend had her PC by an always open window. The road outside was asphalt but with the accumulation of farming detritus the passing traffic was always kicking up dust. She also had a couple of very shaggy Old English Sheepdogs.
The insides of the PC were thick with dog hairs and dust - all bound into sticky clumps by tobacco tar.
Given that he was the master of inventing new words and phrases, I think it’s safest to say that he was a genuine living example of “this means what I want it to mean when I want it to mean it”.
Not in the case of interrogative “wherefore” = “why”, he wasn’t — the earliest citation in the OED dates back to c. 1200. However, he is the earliest citation of the noun “wherefore” = “cause, reason”, in his Comedy of Errors:
Ant. Shall I tell you why?S. Dro. I, sir, and wherefore; for they say, euery why hath a wherefore.
That line probably doesn't mean what you think it does. Juliet is not asking "Where are you, Romeo?". She isn't expecting Romeo to be there. She doesn't expect him to come to her at any point. This is her talking to herself, and Romeo's location isn't what she's concerned with.
She is asking "Why are you Romeo", because she has fallen into Shakespearean love* with him but this is a problem for her. Her parents would presumably not be very happy with this love since they're feuding, they have a different idea as to who she should marry, and there would probably be problems if she even tried to approach Romeo to talk with him. As far as she knows, she can't do anything about her newfound love and is doomed to never spend time with the one she loves, assuming he returns her feelings. The sentence can more accurately be translated as "Why does it have to be Romeo", and she proceeds on to talk about the meanings of names in the famous "What's in a name" speech to describe how her love takes precedence over either of their names.
* Shakespearean love: a thing almost but not entirely unlike love, but don't let the sheer unrealisticness of this thing or how seriously people take something that took all of five seconds to happen distract you from the rest of the words, or you'll be thinking of nothing else for the rest of the play.
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Your extraneous comma after “thou” is leading you to mistakenly conclude that Romeo is vocative and that “wherefore” = “where”. It isn’t, and the OED does not list “where” among the interrogative uses of “wherefore”. Read further along in that act:
JUL.O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?
Deny thy father and refuse thy name;
Or, if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love,
And I’ll no longer be a Capulet.
ROM.
Aside.
Shall I hear more, or shall I speak at this?
JUL.
’Tis but thy name that is my enemy;
Thou art thyself, though not a Montague.
What’s Montague? It is nor hand nor foot,
Nor arm nor face, nor any other part
Belonging to a man. O, be some other name!
What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other word would smell as sweet;
So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call’d,
Retain that dear perfection which he owes
Without that title. Romeo, doff thy name,
And for thy name, which is no part of thee,
Take all myself.
Shakespeare used the standard interrogative “wherefore” = “why” so that Juliet could expand upon the consequences of Romeo having that name — “wherefore art thou Romeo?” = “why are you Romeo?” = “why must you be Romeo Montague?” — and thus offers herself in exchange for his name so that they may be together.
There are two other instances of “wherefore” in Romeo and Juliet ; do you also believe that they mean “where”?
And here I was thinking it was C. J. Dennis:
"Wot's in a name?" she sez… An' then she sighs,
An' clasps 'er little 'ands, an' rolls 'er eyes.
"A rose," she sez, "be any other name
Would smell the same.
Oh, w'erefore art you Romeo, young sir?
Chuck yer ole pot, an' change yer moniker!"
(Songs of a Sentimental Bloke, ch. 5)
...
A tug named Tyball (cousin to the skirt)
Sprags 'em an' makes a start to sling off dirt.
Nex' minnit there's a reel ole ding-dong go—
'Arf round or so.
Mick Curio, 'e gits it in the neck,
"Ar rats!" 'e sez, an' passes in 'is check.
Quite natchril, Romeo gits wet as 'ell.
"It's me or you!" 'e 'owls, an' wiv a yell,
Plunks Tyball through the gizzard wiv 'is sword,
'Ow I ongcored!
"Put in the boot!" I sez. "Put in the boot!"
"'Ush!" sez Doreen… "Shame!" sez some silly coot.
I once worked somewhere they had oddly nice carpets*, and after a few years of wear decided to have them shaved - a process where the top of the pile is clipped off by a machine a bit like a lawnmower. Despite some fairly impressive dust extraction equipment in use, every single pc, printer, router, etc acquired a filling of ultra-fine, v short wool fibres. We spent weeks vacuuming them out.
*TBF, I'm pretty sure the whole thing cost a lot less than recarpeting to the same quality would have done. Lovely top end wool carpets.
When I got to Uni in the mid-eighties, they had the Worcester Area Campus Computer Consortium. And a bunch of Wangs down in the basement of the library to do term papers and such on. It was invariably referred to be saying you had to go "Waccc off on the wang" when you needed to do some work
At one of my first jobs we had a set of networked-ish Wang word processors with fabulous 8" floppies.
They were connected to some pretty amazing daisy-wheel printers, each of which resided in its own sound-insulated enclosure. Those printers made the dot-matrix variety seem like whisperers. They were even capable of being modified to print Braille - imagine the force required to make those raised dots on the thick paper required for that task. They also needed a different platen that had a hard interior, but a softer exterior to allow the raised dots to stay raised.
Just thinking about the noise of those things makes my head hurt.
Medical transcription offices in the GTA, late 70's early 80's had herds of those things. My mom's office ran 12 of them. If you know University Avenue in T.O. you know which hospitals I'm talking about.
I recall that, since there was carpet tile in the office, and they printed in the office, that once a month or perhaps every other month they'd have someone come in to vacuum out the systems, and remove the carpet bits, dust, and paper fibres. They cleaned the PC cases, *and* the video monitor cases out. Mom worked nights at the time, and would get a night of switching machines while the (usually 3 bodies) were cleaning the systems.
I don't think the cleaning crew worked for Wang, but well, there are jokes in this one too.
My girlfriend worked deep in the archives of XX&X corporation. Metal shelving surrounded by lovely Nylon carpet. HVAC adjusted dry to hold-down mold in ancient papers. She was getting ZAP electrocuted many times a day. I soldered a 1Meg resistor to a metal ring. Left 1/8" stub on the far end. If she remembered to touch the ring-stub to metal first, the charge mostly dissipated.
IBM-ish PCs invaded the school where I worked. About the time the clean tile floors (probably asbestos-tar) were replaced by the cheapest Nylon carpet. Every Halloween through to Spring we had a rash of "crashes". Always right after being away and coming back to the keyboard. I remember back in the 1950s or earlier, anesthesiologists using explosive gasses circulated a paper "keep a close eye on the nurses' underwear" (silk or Nylon?). I didn't want to see Nancy's bloomers, so I prepared Downy fabric softener diluted in a sprayer, and damped the seats and carpets throughout the offices, and told the staff to be liberal any time their slips stuck (apparently the first sign; I would not know). Had a couple more, I asked "Did you spray?", and that was almost the end of it. (One keyboard had no internal grounding so I bodged a jumper.)
Back in the day I worked on CAD/CAM stuff. One client had an issue with the PC that they used to send and receive CNC programs to the machine tools (oh I remember running serial cables and soldering on the plugs) Turned up and said PC was in a little office area in the middle of the shop, surrounded by CNC grinders. Pulling the cover off revealed the motherboard to be covered with a thick layer of metal dust. Amazing that the thing had survived that long.
Went to do something on a customer's PCs. To get to them you had to have a safety lesson - as they were in an room accessed from the underground railway tracks.
They had only been installed a few months. The amount of brown sticky dust they had attracted - presumably from the trains' braking systems - made them look ancient.
Ahh... the good old days with Winchester drives.
We had a customer that decided to renovate part of their office which included replacing a bunch drywall. A few days later I get a call....your computer isn't working.
It turns out the air filter on the drive had become plugged with drywall dust resulting in a serious headcrash and I had to replace the fixed platter. No airflow to support the heads flying slightly above the disk's surface created an interesting circular pattern on the platter.
I still have that platter.
The platters on the big CDC 600MB drives were probably at least 18 inches (50cm) in diameter. In the early days they were tricky to set up - and head crashes were frequent. The engineer would display the platter with a silver gouge about 20mm wide - all the way round..
A customer's IT manager had moved into an office previously occupied by a higher ranking manager. It was very nice - with wall to wall carpet. On his first day a workman came in and cut a wide strip off all the edges of the carpet. It was now the regulation carpet size allowed for the IT manager's rank.
In the 1970s UK Civil Service, if you had not reached the appropriate rank for the carpet (or desk, hatstand, coatrack), had been moved into an office that had said items, and had use of said items (for a year?), you were then entitled to it; even if you were moved elsewhere.
My union rep insisted that details of the hardwood kneehole desk, 3 cornered coat/hatstand, and carpet square that were in my office were entered into my staff file so that I would be entitled to them in future. Apparently my lowly rank meant that I should only have had linoleum, 2 clothes hooks mounted on the wall/door, and a table desk with a single metal filing cabinet.
When I first worked in local government in the late 70's there was consternation that there would need to be a move to a standard sized desk for staff in the computing department, until then there had been a bank of mainframe terminals in the programmers office and everyone had the 'appropriate' desk for their grade, if someone had the 'wrong' sized desk the property department would remove it and replace it with the 'right' desk. There were also strict rules about access to an external phone. Imagine the consternation when not only did the most junior staff need a bigger desk for the ;computer thingy' but we also needed access to an outside line and would occasionally make international calls to get support.
Most software updates arrived in a box of 5'1/4 inch floppy disk but some of the work we were doing was so 'leading edge' that we had to get software downloads from the suppliers BBS system. we were actually authorised to get an acoustic coupler so we could dial up from one particular handset. Our downloads were impossible during the working day as the operators would physically plug into our line to check the call was still active the very act of doing so would crash the connection and we'd be back to square 1. We ended up coming back in the office later then setting up the downloads, needless to say this seriously lengthened the time required to fix issues.
Many years ago, at company far away, I was responsible for a remote POP site shared by several companies that we leased to. The Boss decided he wanted us to have network access from the site so we could do installs/disconnects on the fly, and I was tasked with setting this up. The order was to buy a computer with a corp card and expense it back. No issues with that part, I bought a computer and set it up, and delivered it after the expense report was paid.
One thing The Boss was adamant about was making sure the computer couldn't walk away. We had new fangled color cameras, so The Boss's solution was to paint the gear so the camera was able to tell if our computer was being carried out. And, of course, I was tasked with the job. I took the lot home, painted it a bright red (same shade as The Register's banner) and used a PC lock to tie the works to a desk and to each other. Looked like hell as I used spray-on automotive paint, and applied it with a very cheap paint brush.
Why The Boss was concerned about a gigantic PC and huge CRT walking out the door of a site which only 5 very well paid technicians had access to, armed guards, security cameras and a long, convouted access trail (HUGE building, site was in a sub-basement maze) was beyond me, until later on I found out that The Boss was actually stealing equipment from our main office regularly, and had accumulated several dozen laptops and other expensive gear. Guess it's easy to assume everyone's a thief when you yourself are.
I had a Wang 2200B with two tape drives, one for data and one to load the next bit of the program - it had 12K of memory (occupying one board and half of another, said boards being about the size of the not-yet-invented S100 boards). Payroll, Orders, Invoices, stock control, general accounting for a small engineering factory.
I worked for ICL in the 80's and 90's, we were known as ICL'er's, our consulting opposition were known as IBM'ers and the lower echelon were kown as 'employees of Wang organisation'
The people who got the most stick 'literally' were the Rediffusion computer engineers who maintained the key to disk systems used for data entry. Whilst Rediffusion made very high tech flight simulators the cabinets of the k to disk systems were actually made of laminated chipboard, whilst the IBM and ICL engineers had hi tech bags of tools the Rediffusiuon engineers biggest problem was hinges breaking and they toolkit included wood filler and drills to allow them to re-attach them. One of the IBM engineers I knew did carry a rube of wood glue that he would ';helpfully' offer to any Rediffusion engineers he encountered.
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