Reply to post: Woking

This PDP-11/70 was due to predict an election outcome – but no one could predict it falling over

Gerhard den Hollander

Woking

We used to have an office in Woking, next to the trainstation. 4 times an hour, whenever the train left the station, it would send powerspikes into our building. You would see the lights dim and then brighten before getting back to normal. Same powerspike would sometimes take down a computer, which could usually be fixed by a reboot. Even after supplying most machines with a UPS the spike would sometimes be too strong for the spike-limiter (or whatever it was called) in the UPS and take down the machine.

In other days, we had dual monitor setups for most of our users, even in the mid-90s ... big 24inch sun monitors that could do 1920x1200. When you turned on both at once, they would both go through their de-gaussing step at the same time, and could happily be bouncing of each other for minutes before one of them would give up and they would both stabilize.

Even more fun after a powerfailure, and you restored power only to remember slightly too late that you hadnt switched off all the monitors. The powersurge of more than a dozen of these beasts starting up would immediately trip the breakers

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