Shocks from a hairy jumper crashed a PC, but the boss wouldn't believe it Many a middle aged man knows that hair today is gone tomorrow, but every Friday you can count on The Register bringing you a new instalment of On-Call, our reader-contributed tales of tech support tasks that required tact in the face of trying truculence. This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Monty" because in the 1990s …
I have seen photophobic mice before. When the afternoon sun came round the building and lit up the Boss's desk desk the mouse would become non-responsive.
Option 1 was to open up the mouse and paint the inside of the paper thin shell to block the sunlight, or option 2, to swap the mice with those used by the poor mole rats that occupied a windowless office elsewhere in the building. I think you can probably guess the option selected by the lazy Helldesk PFY that I was at the time!
When I were a lad...
Well, maybe not quite a lad.
When I was a student, our computer labs were on the 10th and higher floors in a city centre building, which then got sunlight (hey - it was Scotland, so it only happened occasionally). We had a lab of Sun Workstations. You know, the ones which needed a metal mousemat painted with dots to work. Had exactly the same problem so you could have 20 or 30 machines at a time suddenly not in mouse mode.
Many years ago I worked for a company who had some limited presence in Australia and New Zealand. We delivered telco services via satellite to a bunch of smaller places, and one day we had a complete outage at one of our sites. Deducing that we didn't even have incoming signals to our equipment at the site, we sent our trusty local engineer Tim on site to check that there was power to the receiver and other basic things. After he eventually climbed up on the roof of the building and removed a fried spider bigger than his own palm (he sent pictures) from the receiver head, signals came back.
Oops, gave myself away there. Indeed, my particular speech impediment is growing up on "the Surrey-Hampshire border".
Upvote because Britain has many accents... There's "joompeh" and the "swea'uh", for example. And a few dialects that are nigh on indecipherable, such as that infamous bloke from Zummerzet that turned up on Hot Fuzz.
we have three words for the same garment
It's possibly a family thing, but around here,
M.
Sssssshhhhh, don't give the game away. "TheRegister.com" has been very obviously trying to aim at a mainly US audience (and pass itself off as indistinguishable from American) for several years now.
Drawing attention to unfortunate oversights like this risks undoing all that hard work!
I emigrated here, to the land down under, many, many moons ago. Her indoors wanted to holiday in FNQ (Far North Queensland). Restaurant in the rain forest, a spider the size of a dinner plate, very black, very hairy just sauntered through slowly on the floor. When pointed out to the staff, "Oh that's Bruce" (forgotten the name, could have been Eric), "'He's' a Queensland bird eating spider that comes through this time every night, no need to worry". The bastard was HUGE.
I once watched an engineer remove a brand new master board for a Sony DXC3000 camera from it's antistatic packaging.
As he did so he spotted a static discharge from his index finger. All I heard was a sotto voce "Oh Shit" as he realised he had forgotten his anti-static band.
Board not functioning on receipt read the return paperwork....
At my old uni they replaced the carpet in the corridor to the computer lab and during the first warm dry weather you'd get a lovely crack as you started to type in the door code. The code lock didn't last too long after that. It took a couple of replacements before they figured out the actual cause and replaced the carpet.
I remember working on the Sony Pro gear back in the day. The DXC3000 was a very expensive camera back then. Weren't they like $16,000, in 1980s money ($48,500 in 2003 money), plus the cost of lenses?
It's hard to believe that a modern, sub $100 digital camera beats their quality.
This story reminds me of an event many years ago. I was performing some routine maintenance on multiple 486 machines running Windows 3.1. Walking back and forth across the carpet a few times was enough to build sufficient a static charge in me that when I reached for the mouse of one machine, I felt the zap of the escaping 'angry pixies' and watched as the machines hdd led came on and stayed on. I had fried a vital component of the multi-io board (remember them?) and the box was now totally unresponsive and unable to boot.
While awaiting the delivery of a replacement multi-io board, I placed a note on the monitor which read "Under treatment". I kept tropical fish as a hobby at the time. One of the other staff members added "Nil by mouse" to it. Amused by this I agreed she could submit it to The Readers Digest. They published it in one of their end of article fillers and we shared the spoils.
Remember the anti-static mousepads they used to sell? The ones with a snap in one corner for attaching a ground wire?
They weren't for grounding the mouse. They were there to ground the user.
The "What if ... ?" aspect of destructive testing was one of my favorite games for several years. I've measured 115,000V after running a standard vacuum cleaner over the floor of a SillyConValley shipping & receiving department. Lots of very small particles moving quickly through a plastic tube caused the static buildup. The next stop on the cleaner's schedule was the stockroom, with shelves & shelves full of static sensitive parts. Much hilarity ensued.
I once measured 61,750ish volts on an empty, unused Styrofoam coffee cup set down on an isolated table after a colleague walked across a nylon carpet wearing Nikes ... Was an example, just to prove the point.
In other news, the average secretary can generate upwards of 85KV walking down the hall to get a cuppa, but myself walking alongside her came up static free. Seems my unmentionables were made of cotton, hers were made of silk and petrochemicals. Her heels were leather, my soles were high-carbon rubber.
No, the above isn't sexist, it's observed reality ... and she volunteered to take part in the experiment. She also managed to drag another 21 of her female cow orkers into "the game" (as she called it), giving us some real data to make recommendations. Interesting couple of months, that.
In terms of static build up, leather is good, synthetic is bad. I only get static shocks at work in winter, when the weather is really bad and I wear sturdy shoes with synthetic soles. The rest of the year I wear leather soles, they transfer any static buildup away from the body.
Another time I worked for a small consulting outfit that was in a loft over a piano and organ store. There was a shag nylon carpet that could really build up a charge. I discovered if everyone just took off their shoes, the moisture in the socks and feet was enough to discharge any buildup of static. Even on that carpet. No grounding straps needed. There was enough ventilation that the smell of un-shod feet wasn't oppressive....
As I recall, multi-i/O boards had an 8-bit-bus card edge connector, usually were used in IBM PC- and XT-compatible computers, contained two serial ports, one parallel port, a battery-backed realtime clock, and a floppy diskette controller, but no hard disc controller. Were your 486 machines floppy-disc-only, or was your multi-i/o card some sort of proprietary thing? (There were plenty of weird proprietary things floating around back then.)
Can't remember the board maker but think they had hdd and fdd direct attached by ribbon cables. Parallel and serial ribbons to a separate slot. They could support 2 x hdd and 2 x fdd and some even came with a game port - 15 pin D type. The machines were beige boxes branded Wren. Originally started out as 486DX-33 but we upgrade them to 486DX-66 (wow!) and fitted a cooler for the CPU. So sad that I can remember all that :(
Multi-I/O cards changed over time. Anything other than an original 8088/86 or 80286 based PC would likely have had the realtime clock on the motherboard, and the multi-I/O card would have been 16-bit and had FDD, HDD, parallel and one or two serial ports on them and most likely IDE-based by the time 486s came along.
I'm sure I've told this story before, but...
A friend of mine used to work on systems that used pneumatic computers.These used air and various pipes to form integrators, differentiators, and the like.
However, one of the systems would regularly fail during the night shift, and none of the diagnostics run the following morning threw up anything to help solve the problem. So, my friend was tasked with an all-nighter to keep an eye on the system and have a look at it as soon as it failed.
He got there at the end of his normal working day and sat down with a good book (it was before the days of the internet, after all). Some hours later the night operator arrived with a coffee and took over. The system failed shortly after the replaced worker left the room.
It was at that point that my friend noticed the steam that was being drawn from the coffee cup and into the air inlet of the computer - which wasn't good, as it didn't like damp air! Of course, it had all dried out by morning, which was why the previous attempts to locate the cause had found nothing.
Wang Laboratories' first disk drive was the model 710, a peripheral for 700 series calculators, It looked like a turntable on a pedestal and had a 5KB (yes, "K" bytes!) removable platter and a 5K fixed platter. The electronics were a foot or so down in the pedestal. On the control panel was a "format" button secured by an impressive-looking key switch next to it.
A walk across a carpeted floor to change removable platters or to put paper in an adjacent printer would often cause the 710 to go into its format sequence, wiping out all the data on both platters. We field techs called it "electrostatic formatting"
When the key switch was in the "locked" position, its contacts were open, and eighteen inches of wire floated on a 2K ohm pullup resistor. That was the problem. The solution was to run the wire through a spare inverter on one of the chips, and have the key switch ground the wire via closed contacts when locked. Lotsa data (for its time) gone before the solution, though.
I had a colleague who was super anal about wearing a wrist strap anytime he changed out memory or drives from the workstations, and constantly chastised me for failing to do the same. I never had a problem with static despite ignoring those precautions (the lack of which continues to this day)
He was an older guy who came from an engineering background so maybe he worked with more finicky equipment back in the day where this was necessary. Either that, or he had a shocking experience at some point in the past that burned itself into his very soul!
The instructions beginning "Run tub with cool water. Remove clothing. Stand in tub."?
I know people who actually did that when populating RAM ... Memory was very expensive, and quit delicate at the time. There was a lot of superstition surrounding it.
How expensive? 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 325 bucks today.
[0] From the late, very much lamented Haltec, no less ...
Application note from one of our suppliers reported that the failure rate of their robust, not static sensitive, power electronics went down from something like 1 in 100,000 to more like 1 in 1,000,000 when they adopted static protection measures in production. They didn't actually make a recommendation on static protection -- just that observation.
I, too, live in Canada. And yes, winter gets very cold outdoors and very dry indoors.
I worked in a laboratory in the 1980's and we had a fair amount of not-cheap microprocessor controlled lab equipment. I was programming a lab instrument for an overnight run; I reached towards the keyboard, a spark about 5mm long leapt from my finger, and the WHOLE INSTRUMENT SHUT DOWN! DEAD!
The instrument in question cost about twice my annual salary then. So I was trying to not throw up in my mouth when the cooling fans started spinning up. Then the status lights starting flashing yellow and turning solid green.
I walked over to the lab sink, rinsed my hands under running water, finished programming my overnight run, and never told anyone what had happened.
The Ex
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.
I had an electronics tutor that was known for killing computers bought from Dixon's (Even when tested in store, gets it home, DOA). Make, model, didn't matter. His demonstrations never worked, he blew up transistors for a past time, just by proximity & would spend so much time trying to find a working, or nearest equivalent that the point of the lecture was totally lost.
Some rat of a student (For beer money (Not me)) flogged this to the tabloids as the man who had to discharge himself, before kissing his wife when leaving or arriving from work.
In hindsight, being a lecturer in electronics was the best career course for him, as he was probably unemployable as a field service guy.
*Sorry not sorry.
When I was a PFY so shiny I still couldn't believe I had a job and in telecom to boot, we all fresh employees were given a swatch that had a button on the wristband ( and a metal bit on the inside attached to the button ) so that we could tie the slinky grounding cable that could be found in the racks.
We were told that it was cheaper for them to give us purpose modified watches than making sure the wristbands supposedly attached to the slinky cable were still there and getting replacements for them when they weren't... I lost mine one day in Gare du Nord when the wristband failed and I didn't notice it fell when I removed my vest while waiting for a train on a hot day.
When ferreting about inside PC cases even today I keep my forearms bare and touch one or other to the bare metal of the case and keep it there before diving in. Never trusted leads as deliberately open circuit ones where left around the labs by Mr Funny in one place I worked. Except of course when training in which case the avo came out to check.
Do that myself, but it does rely on having an earthed case, and leaving it plugged in. Much safer these days of enclosed power supplies, but potentially quite hazardous in even fairly recent times with open-frame PSUs, and I've met more than several items of consumer kit (CD players, amplifiers, video recorders, that sort of thing) where the supposedly double-insulated (hence no earth) appliances have the mains cord soldered to two large pins sticking straight up out of the PCB with nothing to stop you touching it once you've taken the lid off. Utterly criminal for something that very often you have to diagnose "live" so that you can see exactly which of the nylon cogs is jumping so that the tape won't come out...
M.
Unless you’re German. Hmm. Panzerkampfwagen. Panzerkampfwagenaberkanonne. A.k.a ‘Panzer’, or ‘tank’ to English speakers, and PAK, or anti-tank gun. A direct translation of panzerkampfwagen would be ‘Armored Battle Vehicle’. Note that ‘tank’ in this context is because the things were developed by the Royal Navy, under the cover name of ‘water carriers for Mesopotamia’,
Flak is similar: fliegeraberkanonne.
Germans apparently love to mash words together where others just get a new word. Unless they’re French, where they use half a dozen existing words. Because le Academie says so.
"and very un-American, which is the opposite of what El Reg is trying to be."
And I, for one, really wish they wouldn't.
As for static, it's a bugger. Many years ago, I went through a phase of getting a nasty belt nearly every time I touched something metal. Door handles, filing cabinets, my car... it was seriously ouchy.
I've no idea why it started - as far as I know, nothing had changed. No new carpets, shoes, undies. It lasted a few weeks, by which time I was living in dread of the next zap, and then stopped, again for no reason I could figure out. I do not want it to happen again!
There are more ways than static to generate high voltages. The microspectrophotometer had a Z80 S-100 box attached and, for fluorescence work had an XBO (xenon) light source with a stabilized PSU that provided a hefty pulse to strike the arc. We learned to turn on the light before powering up the X80 box.
New to a MSP job, I go to troubleshoot a client's RAID alarm on a Netware 3.11 server. Reboot and get into the RAID console and notice that the SCSI ID on the drives seemed a little odd. They started in order, but then skipped a couple of IDs and listed the last drive last or nearly so. That was the drive it was claiming was missing from the array, but obviously it was present. I wondered what the tech who set the server up was thinking by skipping IDs. I downed the server and opened the case to check the SCSI ID jumpers, and that drive had a dust bunny perfectly jumping the higher ID! Nearly a full can of compressed air later, booted the server back up with all drives correctly ID'ed and off it went to rebuild the array.
After the school office got (nylon) carpeting, every year, start of the heating season, the secretaries in the office would report 'stuck' PCs. The first to go foo was usually Jan---, who had her PC on a plastic-wheeled cart. Last was often Lo--- who had live plants all over the office (and dripping into PCs...) There may have been additional factors in unmentionable garment fabrics, but this was not my purview.
All static electricity of course. Mostly cured by mixing Downy (or CostCo) fabric softener in water in a sprayer, and anointing chairs and carpets twice a week.
Retired, but we still keep a spritzer around the house for the throw-blanket on the couch. The dog is remarkably tolerant of being zapped when people get off the couch but we have the technology to avoid it.
Some time ago I was working on the parking-and-admissions system for an entertainment venue. The terminals had been reliable when originally deployed in Florida, but were prone to crashing when installed at a newly-rebuilt venue in New Jersey. Turns out that the agents had smart, new, polyester uniforms. They were seated on smart, new stools with plastic seats and plastic-tipped metal legs. When they'd scoot their bum against the stool's seat, static electricity would be generated. The solution was to provide conductive plastic seat covers, and remove the plastic tips from the legs, so that the stools were (sorta) grounded to the stone floors in the admissions booths. After that, no problems.
Back when I were a lowly PFY, the IT director (who happened to be female) showed up to work wearing a very fluffy and very pink sweater one day. ESD concerns aside, we were doing some work on a server that day and discovered pink fluff on the air filter (even though she had only been in the building about an hour at that point).
Our BOFH informed her that we had taken a vote, and decided she needed to take her shirt off. Fortunately for all involved, she took the joke well (I'm not very PC now, and was less polished in my youth, but even back then, I thought that may be a bit over the line).
At our company picnic that summer, she brought the offending shirt and tossed it on the bonfire.
In the late 70's I was working in Israel developing an office computer. As Israel is a hot country rooms have stone tiled floors, not carpet.
Once ready we shipped our gleaming new computer to our first customer, in Germany (You can guess where this is going).
Soon reports of failure came in which we could not reproduce at home so we had to go to Germany to investigate on site. I still remember the electric shock going through my fingers when I touch a metal radiator while standing on a nylon carpet.
> Every radiator, filing cabinet and door handle became a test of courage.
Friend worked in a corporate archive library. Heavy A/C to preserve old paper. Filing cabinets and doorknobs were shocking. I soldered a 1Meg resistor on a trinket ring so she could touch metal and discharge herself in more than a pico-instant, so the shock was hardly felt.
Picture a data center in the basement of a tall building in San Francisco's financial district. Card punch up against a wall, near the ancient Otis heavy goods lift. Every now and again, at seemingly random times, the punch generated errors for a couple characters. Nobody could figure out why, not even IBM's field circus dudes.
Until IBM was traipsing in and out one fine weekend, upgrading who knows what hardware, as only IBM could. Someone (ahem) noticed that the gibberish was being generated about ten seconds before the elevator doors opened.
Turned out that the motor for the lift was drawing so much current when it first started that it was inducing errors in the punch on the other side of the wall. Nobody put two and two together prior to this because the lift rarely went into the basement (that level was key-protected) ... until IBM was in and out that morning.
Once I figured it out, and could reproduce the problem at will, a little shielding (spec'd, provided and installed by IBM, gratis!) made it go away permanently.
"(spec'd, provided and installed by IBM, gratis!)"
Well, the electrical and RFI specs for devices in most countries usually specify that the device not only should not produce too much RFI but should also continue to work in the presence of RFI. So either IBM or Otis would be on the hook to resolve that situation :-)
But yeah, spotting it in the first place can be interesting and fun. Most often it's when a fresh pair of eyes turn up knowing that the people who already looked at it are good and will have tried all the obvious things already. The right pair of eyes with the right type of brain behind them knows it time to think outside the box.
We had the lift shaft problem with our Z8000 Onyx back in goodness knows when.
These either side of the wall stories remind me of Feynman's which, of course, is one up on the rest of them: visiting Oak Ridge and discovering the enriched uranium being stacked up in the required small lots but back to back against a wall.
Newly appointed peripatetic teacher was based in my off-site class. She had access to our (only) RM 480Z I think, computer on days when I was out in schools and vice versa.
And she was always complaining that the PC kept crashing. Which had never happened for me. Until the day that I was in for admin time and she had a cancelled slot so came back to the base.. As she walked past me in her lovely mohair jumper the computer crashed.....
USB is well known for its poor handling of static discharges, it can lock the whole chain of controllers and hubs totally. Not even a forced hard computer reset will recover it at times. Only way is to remove the computer's power. Some hubs are much better than others I've noticed.
I've had to add extra discharge protections (extra earthing of equipment and metalwork around it, shielding of cables) to equipment using USB devices to get some reliability.
Static abounds if you don't treat for it, especially if the weather's dry. An electronics assembly line will have conductive floor tiles, conductive smocks on the workforce (or anyone else visiting the production area) and the usual collection of wrist and heel straps. Office areas have carpet treatment (if all else fails a spray bottle with a dilute solution of a fabric softener such as Downey will kill static). Engineers know to ground themselves before touching any electronic assemblies or test equipment.
Despite this you can pick up some quite big charge while walking around. The scene in "Office Space" where our hero reluctantly touches a door handle, generating a huge spark, isn't that much of an exaggeration. "The Boss" needs to be made aware of static precautions.....
Yeah, had of those "random" problems once too. Working in a small computer repair shop, one day a local customer down the street brought a computer in. Said it was brand new and would always crash after running for 15-20 min. Put it up on our workbench a bit later and was playing with the computer for half an hour. No crash. Let it sit busy with the screensaver for the rest of the day, no crash. Customer picked the computer up just before closing. Came back the next morning, and 3 more times, always the same, claiming it would crash after those 15-20min.Was working just peachy fine in our shop. The last time he brought it in, on Saturday, he sat himself at our workbench for a couple hours. No crash. Took it home and called half an hour later. It had crashed and rebooted again. As we were just closing the store, I went over to his house a couple of blocks away. Nice home office in a covered, converted patio. He turned the computer back on when I came in and presto, a few minutes later, it rebooted. While the machine came back up, he lamented that he started to think that his place was cursed. While talking, me telling him that I noticed a flickering in the lighting, after that roughly 15min time span, his wife walked into the room and down a narrow staircase inside. When she opened up the door, to a room under the former pattio, the computer crashed and rebooted again. But this time, I did not only notice the light flickering, but also noticed the sound of the compressor of a large freezer in that basement room kicking in. Turned out that the freezer was on the same electrical circuit as his office upstairs and the draw of the freezer kicking in was enough to cause a brownout and subsequent reboot of the computer upstairs. Had an electrician first thing on Monday morning separate the circuits and that computer worked happily ever after...
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