[geeks] Big Blue Smoke

[Will Mc Donald]

From: "Steven Hill" <sjh at matrix.net>
> > Fortunately IBM mainframes have redundancy built in and rarely
> > suffer a complete failure.  You'd be more likely to have cache
> > corruption in your USIII processor that you'd have to sign an NDA
> > to get fixed than have the mainframe completely fail.
>
> On the 3090-200J that I played with a few years ago, we had a large
> crate arrive from spain. Of its own accord.
>
> What the fsck is this, said I?
>
> Just then, Gordon Bennett, from IBM, Greenock walked in and said, that
> will be the replacement DASD unit that your system ordered.

Is that a made up name? :)

> Jolly good said I.
>
> And I returned to playing Doom on the helpdek PC

I love these stories of mainframes notifying people that they're going to
break.

There's a similar one about the guy covering a Christmas day shift somewhere
when a bloke just turns up out of the blue in a van with a new disk in the
middle of a snowstorm.

Will.