Posts by Lopan

Polishing off a printer with a flourish revealed not to be best practice

Back in the old days of line printers and such, I was the computer operation supervisor on a banking system that had a

printer page separator or burster as it was known, the damn thing had stopped on me and I started looking inside as to why.

Like any idiot I stuck my hand in there to get a tiny piece of paper out and get it going again.

I didn't unplug the beast before I did that and it started by itself and munched my left hand.

Took off the end of middle finger and broke the ends of the rest. What fun. Not

Now I have a somewhat screwed up middle finger but all in all I got lucky.

As liquid cooling takes off in the datacenter, fortune favors the brave

I worked with a Cray 1 supercomputer long ago. Freon cooled (liquid). Liquid cooling is not all that new

Chinese researchers make car glide 35mm above ground in maglev test

Slot cars are back.

A 1970s magic trick: Take a card, any card, out of the deck and watch the IBM System/370 plunge into a death spiral

It wasn't running a non ibm os was it? Like MVT/VSE?

Used to be a operator, then a system programmer. The non IBM mainframe os's were really touchy. All that stolen code.

The wonderful days of cards. long cards or short cards?

When the IT department speaks, users listen. Or face the consequences

I had a similar thing happen. The boss of one of the other departments was told to backup your files on a "z" drive and a external drive and was told multiple times how to. Didn't and lost everything. Told my boss about it and he asked how much to send out the drive to be recovered. Told him and he turned white. No recovery.She hated my guts but couldn't complain. Idiots happen everywhere. I retired after she left.